


delete this transmission

by horriblekids



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Artificial Intelligence, M/M, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-16
Updated: 2015-02-16
Packaged: 2018-03-12 23:03:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 67,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3358583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horriblekids/pseuds/horriblekids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Yeah,” he says, catching sight of his reflection in the dimly reflective surface and running fingers through his hair to fluff it up. And instead of getting on the mag-train home like he wants to, he catches the northbound train to the greenlawn with Calum. “You know, I think I might not go through with it,” he tells his best friend, meaning his activation. They sit together across from the back doors of the car and watch the adverts for an upcoming showing of ‘Titanic’ at the interactive theater. While Calum sits beside him silently he gnaws on a thumbnail and wonders whether it’s too late to get his money back.</p><p>“You can’t go back on it now,” Calum tells him.</p><p>And it’s true: His payment has already been processed, the credits removed from his profile. The invoice showed up in his e-net overnight and he’d added it to his encrypted folder. “It’s just - weird,” he says, weighing each of the words on his tongue before he speaks. “To be in charge of another person like that. I don’t want that responsibility.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	delete this transmission

**Author's Note:**

> A massive thank you to Dash, as always, for being my anchor when I set myself adrift with this back in November. Thanks as well to Ellen, who tirelessly listened to me rant and ramble for days about the difficulties with this fic and who contributed immensely to the world-building part of it. It wouldn’t be nearly the fic it turned out to be without your endless stream of questions about the world it takes place in and incredibly helpful pointers about the potential for post-apocalyptic governing bodies. I’d also like to thank Jake for being the best friend in the world. 
> 
> To everyone from Tumblr, thank you for sticking with me even though it took me months to bring this fic to life and thank you for putting up with me even though there’s barely anything in the tag for this fic. I hope it lives up to your expectations! This is officially the longest fic I’ve ever written. Any factual or scientific errors are entirely my own; a lot of the science thrown around in-text is theoretical fringe science, so I apologize to the actual scientists whose work I’ve probably completely flubbed.
> 
> So thank you, dear readers, for giving the weirdness that lives in my head a shot. You can find me as usual on Tumblr [here](http://sixmoreyears.tumblr.com).

“I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.”   **Aldous Huxley,** _Brave New World_

 

[DELETE THIS TRANSMISSION](http://8tracks.com/sixmoreyears/delete-this-transmission?utm_medium=trax_embed) from [sixmoreyears](http://8tracks.com/sixmoreyears?utm_medium=trax_embed) on [8tracks Radio](http://8tracks.com?utm_medium=trax_embed).

The work day starts out with one of the pneumo-tubes bursting in the mailroom. Ashton’s at his desk scanning barcodes before he puts the newly received tubes in the chute and presses the launch button, making sure that there’s no contraband or outside materials being introduced into the building. It’s not a very important job. He’s using an old-style boxcutter to open the new shipment when the pneumo-tube comes flying down the outgoing chute and shatters because Calum isn’t there to catch it. The sound of the pneumo-glass breaking is probably deafening; Ashton lifts up the corner of his ear protector in time to hear Calum go “Oh, shit,” and the tinkling of broken glass. There are tiny glittering pieces of pale blue caught in Calum’s blonde-streaked hair. He wants to chastise the younger man for not wearing his hardhat, for not paying closer attention to the outgoing chute - but then he sees what’s on the viewscreen in Calum’s corner of the mailroom and presses his lips together, thinking better of it. Instead he gets to his feet, careful not to step on the pneumo-glass as he goes to the supply closet for the push broom. Ashton sweeps it up quickly and pushes all the broken glass into the central recycling vac-tube in the floor. There the glass will be superheated and remade into another tube, probably.  
  
“Are you okay?” Ashton asks quietly, brushing the shattered glass from Calum’s fringe carefully. He avoids looking at the viewscreen. Calum’s been running his sims again, anxious about the release of his Partner once his application has been processed and approved by the lab. Ashton does not think about his undone surveys or sims. He can’t help but watch the simulation run, the lines on the screen transforming from simple brainwaves into the form of a human body before melting away into the features of Calum’s Partner. After a moment he reaches over and touches the escape holo and closes out of the program. “Pay attention to your chute,” he says. They’re already going to the lab together after work; he doesn’t think Calum needs reminding.  
  
He works his way methodically through the day’s shipment, turning each fragile glass tube over in his hands to check its contents before scanning the barcodes. The pneumo-glass looks prettier than solar glass. Ashton’s never liked the opaque glass covering the mag-train walls. The adverts that play during rush hour are annoying and childish; he’d rather look out over the city through pale-colored glass and look down at the building rushing by. The last part of their shift passes by without incident. Calum’s wheeled a mail cart underneath the outgoing chute to catch any stray tubes that may come down. He’s distracted still - has been ever since his savings had maxed out and he’s been eligible to apply for Partnership - but Ashton decides not to say anything to their supervisor about it. It’s kind of expected that job performance will slump in the weeks leading up to the Partnership application and approval date.  
  
It’s not as if the fate of the world rides on their ability to catch and release thin pneumo-glass tubes in a timely manner. Their bosses are always telling them in meetings, “You boys are the backbone of this organization,” or else it’s “Nothing comes or goes from this building without your approval, which means you’re being held to a higher standard,” neither of which inspire confidence given that the mailroom is an entry-level, minimum-creds position. Calum doesn’t seem to mind it and Ashton tries his best not to. He had hoped to get a slightly better job after their secondaries, but he hadn’t wanted to leave Calum behind and anyway he’d only tested into the mid-level fields. In another, simpler time, maybe he would have helped Calum with the assessments but as they are now it’s an individual test of one’s potential brain activity in adulthood. Ashton has to shake the thought from his brain. No point in dwelling on the past, he reminds himself.  
  
The BLITS logo has been emblazoned into his mind permanently by sheer force of the advertisements plastered on every possible surface. ‘Better Living Through Science!’ they all say, showing a plain-faced smiling man wearing a colorful top next to his blank-faced Partner wearing all white. In the background there’s a happy baby shown wriggling around on the carpet playing with blocks. It’s supposed to instill confidence in the system but mostly what it does is make Ashton feel hollow and nauseous knowing that he’s perpetuating the same ideas that he claims to hate. He doesn’t give a shit about the genetic ideal; what he wants is to feel something for once in his life, something real and vibrant instead of existing in the same whitewashed world he’s always lived in. When the tone sounds to signal shift change, he’s quick to step away from his workstation and strip out of his hard hat and ear protectors before he shucks off the shiny silver jumpsuit all mailroom employees have to wear. The fabric is stiff and slippery in his hands. It’s supposed to protect them in case a tube shatters and for the most part they do a decent enough job of it. Today he’s thankful for it, thinking of how things could have gone much worse when the tube had shattered on Calum. As it stands Calum has a tiny red line above his eyebrow where the glass had struck him.  
  
Once they’ve stripped out of the jumpsuits they have to go through the anti-bac chamber and stand perfectly still while the nozzles mounted on robotic arms dart around them, spraying them with a fine disinfectant mist before they’re allowed into the main commons to put their street clothes on. The mist dries almost immediately. The main commons is nearly deserted when they step out of the chamber. Ashton gets his things from his locker with a swipe of his thumb print; as soon as it’s detected his unique set of lines and whorls the door springs open, presenting him with his jeans and sweater. Beside him Calum’s busy with his own locker, pausing to check his available credits before slamming the door shut. “Looks like we’re taking the mags,” he says grimly.  
  
Ashton puts his jacket on before following Calum to the elevator. He lets Calum step onto the first disc, waiting for him to disappear down the elevator shaft before taking his own disc and balancing carefully on it to the mag-train depot underneath the building. Out of their jumpsuits and safety goggles they’re almost unrecognizable to the larger group of men and women in business attire waiting on the platform. Most give them disdainful looks, not knowing that the young men in jeans and sneakers are the same silver-jumpsuited aliens that deliver their mail through the chutes without comment. The train comes swishing up the tracks a few moments later. Ashton and Calum hang back, allowing the stuck-up accounts employees to enter the train first before swiping their thumbs across the reader and taking seats near the back of the car. At the current hour the mag-train is full of people on their way home from work, clad in suits and ties as well as coveralls and work boots. There are a few couples scattered throughout the car as well - Ashton catches a glimpse of another man about his age leading his red-haired Partner by the hand to the accessible seating zone.  
  
She must be freshly released from the lab. There’s a dark pair of sunglasses perched on her nose and Ashton remembers from the endless comms the lab had sent that light sensitivity would be a problem for about the first week. He grits his teeth and tries not to think about how much he hates that; he hates that they’re grown in nutri-gel tanks and deprived of all sensation until the moment they’re introduced to their organic partner. It might have been romantic at the beginning. Now it just seems cruel. He tries to squash those feelings deep inside his mind, steeling himself for the cold reality of the lab. Beside him, Calum watches the adverts playing on the back of the solar glass windows. Ashton watches the man and his Partner, watches the way he doesn’t even bother to interact with her or explain what’s going on, where they’re going. Her vision must still be blurred from the foul-smelling paste that gets applied across their lash lines to protect their eyes in the tanks. As always, just before the BLITS labs stop Ashton wants to get off the mag-train. He doesn’t like going to the labs - in fact he hates it - but when the toneless voice announces that the doors are closing on the greenlawn station Calum taps his knee excitedly.  
  
The mag-train doors only open at the front for the BLITS stop. It used to be too dangerous for them to open the back doors - Ashton’s seen the videos of protestors rioting and pushing the train over before swarming into the building just like everyone else has - and now they remain closed at all lab locations as a safety precaution. Calum grips onto his forearm as they step onto the platform alongside several others who look equally as excited to be at the lab. Probably visiting their intended Partner, Ashton assumes, or… There are a few people dressed in the telltale white clothing that demarcates Partners from the rest of society. He assumes they’re there for a check-up or some fine-tuning. “We’re here,” Calum whispers reverently, staring up at the towering building.  
  
“Yeah,” Ashton says. The inside of his mouth suddenly feels dry. He wonders if he’s got enough available credits to get a water bottle from the vending machines in the lobby before they go up. At the elevator bay he swipes his thumb over the reader and touches the water bottle icon; a few seconds later a cylindrical bottle comes rattling down the vending chute and into his hand. The vending chutes are safer; everything’s made of soft bio-plastic that will leave a bruise at worst. He follows Calum’s lead and steps onto the solid metal plate hovering inside the elevator shaft. One thing he does like about the BLITS lab is that the elevators, at least, are built to hold two. Instead of grabbing a hoverdisc at their leisure instead every two minutes or so the magnetic plates go through another rotation, making for a slow journey to the upper levels. Ashton always feels more secure on the thicker metal; he’s always afraid that the hoverdisc will fail and he’ll fall.  
  
The development lab is on the sixth floor, taking then twelve minutes to arrive. Calum steps off first, beaming widely at the receptionist as they approach the check-in desk. Ashton thumbs in along with Calum and the receptionist pulls their folders out of the pneumo-chute beside her desk a moment later. If he squints a bit he can see their names printed at the top of the files in block letters: HOOD, CALUM T. and IRWIN, ASHTON F. He always wonders what’s inside their files to make the folder so thick. It makes sense for Calum to have a lot of data, but he’s been successful in avoiding all but the mandatory data points and he’s always thought that his file should be a bit… slimmer.  
  
“If you’ll follow me,” the receptionist says, leading them past the frosted glass doors into the intake area. There’s a large holoscreen across from the couches, flickering slightly as it plays the latest episode of some crappy net-drama Ashton doesn’t particularly care about. “Your technicians should be with you shortly,” she tells them, dropping their folders into the appropriate slots in the technician bay before striding back to her own workstation with short, clipped steps. The only sound for a moment is the click-clack of her heels against the hard ceramic tiles. Ashton sinks back into the plush faux-leather sofa and watches the flickering images on the holoscreen while they wait for their technicians.  
  
It only takes a few minutes for Calum’s technician to materialize. He’s a bit older than they are - maybe late twenties - and he doesn’t speak much. “Calum? We’re ready for you,” the technician says in his soft-spoken voice. Before he leaves Calum gives Ashton’s shoulder an excited squeeze. There’s a noticeable bounce to his step as he follows his development tech back to where the offices are, leaving Ashton alone to wait for his own appointment. Not for the first time Ashton thinks about just leaving, taking the elevator back down to the mag-train platform. He doesn’t want to be here. The air is dry and suffocating; everything inside the BLITS offices remains sterile at all times, the vents in the ceiling pumping anti-bac molecules through the air conditioning systems. He doesn’t want to think about why the building has to remain sterile either.  
  
But then his own development tech, Dawson according to his name badge, appears and beckons him back into the offices. “Sorry I’m running a bit late,” Dawson tells him apologetically. “I got tapped to help with implantation duties this morning and that ran long.” It makes Ashton feel better that Dawson looks as unhappy about the idea of implantation as he feels. The offices on the development floor are tiny and claustrophobic, dominated by a large viewscreen on one wall and most of the room taken up by the bulky nutri-gel tank. Ashton perches himself on the edge of one of the wheeled office chairs by the viewscreen and waits as the technician pulls up the correct files.  
  
“So that’s him, huh,” Ashton says, gesturing to the tank.  
  
He hadn’t wanted to know the gender at all, but Dawson had been insistent on telling him in case he wanted to make any last-minute changes. “Yeah,” Dawson says, pulling up the 3D model of his Partner’s body scan on the screen. “He’s looking pretty healthy today. You wanna take a look and see how he’s doing?” Ashton keeps his eyes trained on the screen, looking at the outline of all the different internal organs. It’s hard to tell what his Partner will look like from the body scans. Unlike Calum, he hadn’t wanted to know anything about it, preferring instead to be surprised by his results.  
  
He swallows hard and nods. “Yeah,” he says, swiveling his chair to face the tank. “Let’s take a look.”  
  
Ashton’s only looked inside the tank once before, when his Partner was still inactive and nothing more than an empty body in suspension. “Okay,” Dawson says, touching a combination of buttons on the front display of the tank. “We’re about three weeks out from your activation date so he’s not quite done yet, but this should give you an idea of how he’s doing in there.” And the other reason Ashton likes his development tech so much is because unlike most of the people working at BLITS he tends to humanize them. They stand side by side as the top half of the tank goes from opaque to transparent, revealing Ashton’s future Partner.  
  
It would almost look like he were sleeping peacefully if not for the breathing tube in his nose, snaking around to the oxygen canister attached to the side of the tank. His skin is almost translucent still, blue veins showing through at his wrists and forearms. The heart monitor on the display bleats faintly each time his heart pumps on its own. Ashton looks down at the tank for a long while thinking about how his Partner still looks small and fragile despite the statistics that indicate he will probably end up taller than Ashton, a little broader and longer in the legs and torso. It’s hard to think of him as anything but this pale, helpless creature with all kinds of nodes and tubes going into his body. He notices the small hairs beginning to push through at his scalp and underarms.  
  
“Well?” Dawson says gently, nudging him with a well-placed elbow.  
  
“He looks good,” Ashton decides. “Healthy.” He doesn’t feel the way he thinks he should - apprehension wells up inside his stomach, leaving him wondering if he’s made the right decision after all - and Dawson, sensing that, quickly presses another button that quickly changes the glass back to opaque. Today he doesn’t ask if Ashton wants to do any sims, if he wants to see the anticipated final result. He just enters in the data for vital signs and closes out of the simulator. The rhythmic way that the young technician works is soothing during what would otherwise be a jarring experience. Ashton thinks of Calum down the hall running through his sims for the thousandth time, examining his Partner from every possible angle like there’s any way he could have missed an imperfection between one second and the next.  
  
Before he logs out of the system Dawson pauses, fingers hovering over the touchpad hesitantly. “So… have you given any thought to a name? Or is that a stupid question to ask,” he finishes, shooting Ashton a knowing look. When he gets silence in response he laughs and shakes his head. “You’re so stubborn,” he says, running one hand over his buzzed-off hair. Instead of typing something in the name field - which remains woefully blank despite his best attempts at getting Ashton to choose a name - he clicks the button next to the text box. Ashton’s never known what that button was for. As soon as the cursor turns into a spinning gear Dawson logs out of the system. The viewscreen abruptly goes blank, displaying the BLITS logo bouncing back and forth.  
  
They head back to the intake area so he can sign off on the day’s appointment. Dawson gives him a tablet to scroll through while they wait for Calum to finish. He thumbs through the information quickly, knowing that a copy will be sent to his e-net by the time he arrives home. To sign off he has to press his thumb against the e-ink screen and then put his signature down using a slim stylus. When Calum does emerge from the hallway connecting the development offices he’s beaming widely; he’s quick to sign off on his own changes before dragging Ashton out to the elevator bay.  
  
“You seem happy,” Ashton comments. They have to wait a few minutes for a free elevator. Everyone else leaving the development offices seems similarly excited; Calum’s practically vibrating with excitement by the time they step onto the mag-plate.  
  
“Aren’t you happy you won’t have to be alone anymore?” Calum asks.  
  
And Ashton considers the question briefly. “I’ve never really thought of myself as alone,” he says. He doesn’t mind waking up to an empty bed, the slow predictable rhythm of preparing his own meals or doing the washing by himself. The idea of having someone in his home that exists solely to cater to his whims has always seemed foreign. Without the familiar day-to-day activities, what is he supposed to do when he’s at home? He’s heard the stories - along with everyone else in his generation - about people who have gone on to become successful playwrights, authors, net-drama performers once they’ve been freed from the drab mundanity of everyday life by their Partners. Maybe it makes him old-fashioned to enjoy doing things for himself, but it’s just…  
  
It seems an awful lot like the kind of thing they’d been shown during their primaries and secondaries, the same thing that their BLITS teachers had sternly told them was a sin of the past and never to be repeated. The only difference in the past had been segregating human beings by their skin color instead of growing the lower class in glass caskets and calling what they’re given life. Ashton’s never been able to settle on whether it’s better or worse that their Partners don’t know the reality of their suffering. He wishes… Well, it’s pointless to wish for anything. He boards the mag-train after Calum, swiping his thumb automatically across the reader. The train is emptier now after the post-work rush has died off. They take seats up near the front.  
  
A few stops after the greenlawn they say their goodbye, Calum still grinning from ear to ear. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says quickly. Ashton gives him a thin-lipped smile, still feeling jarred from the development lab visit. The feeling intensifies once an older man - mid-thirties, maybe, paunchy and balding - boards the train and sits across the car from Ashton with his Partner. When the sleeves of her white tunic slip up a few centimeters Ashton can see an ugly bracelet of bruising around her wrists. And he knows she can’t feel it - the analgesic gel in the tanks makes sure of that - but it makes him sick nonetheless to think that someone could do that to another human being. It makes his skin crawl when he remembers that he’s in the minority. Most people think of their Partner as an ‘it’ and nothing more, something to be maintained like a car that needs servicing. He feels sick perpetuating a system that treats certain human beings as property.  
  
Not for the first time he considers calling the BLITS offices when he gets home and canceling his Partnership application. His fingers hover over the icon on his netportal - but then he remembers the man on the train and his pinched, smug expression as he’d sat across from Ashton - and then he pulls his hand away. That’s why he’s going through with it. If he can protect even one of the lab-grown from abuse at the hands of those privileged enough to afford him, it will be worth it. A hundred years of scientific advances and society has regressed so far it can’t even consider half its members human anymore. He opens his e-net account instead, saving the files from the development lab in an encrypted folder on the desktop, encrypted so that he can’t open it and view his development files.  
  
The element of surprise makes him feel more like he’s going to be living with another human being, not a sack of skin and bones built up around a crude version of the automation that runs their lives. He immediately scolds himself for thinking like that - for buying into the way BLITS wants him to think - and he steps away from the netportal to prepare a meal for himself. In three weeks it won’t just be him in the compact living quarters. He’s trying to prepare himself for that. It’s just… bizarre, in a way, to think that he’s going to be in sole control of another human being. Ashton finishes the day with an old net-drama from before the Crash, falling asleep before the halfway point.

 

The next two weeks pass by in a haze of pale blue pneumo-glass tubes and adverts behind the seats on the mag-train. Predictably, Calum’s job performance graphs swoop toward the x-axis as they get closer to their activation dates. Ashton’s learned to compensate by rolling the cart full of spare jumpsuits underneath the outgoing chute; the silvery fabric breaks the fall of the tubes, saving them from shattering and the mail needing to be re-sealed before leaving the office. He’s pleased that his own performance graph is climbing, if perhaps a little more slowly than he would have liked. They both work a five day straight schedule, and by the fifth day he feels stiff and worn-out, mechanically turning the tubes without paying much attention before he moves to scan and shoot.  
  
He’s got his hand poised over an unopened shipment, ready to cut through the thick packing tape with his trusty boxcutter, when a hand comes down on his shoulder and startles him. “What,” he snaps, dropping the boxcutter to clatter noisily to the ground.  
  
Calum tugs on his ear protectors until the left one comes off a bit, pouting childishly. “Shift’s up,” Calum says, bending to retrieve the boxcutter before either of them can cut themselves on it. Ashton had missed the tone in his thoughtless haze; he’s been admittedly going through a slump since they visited the lab last. He’s been having nightmares. But he doesn’t admit that to Calum - not that Calum would notice, as preoccupied as he has been staring at the simulated face of his Partner on the viewscreen all week - and simply stands, feeling the pop and creak of his joints snapping back into place. His neck aches after eight hours bent over his workstation sorting tubes. A hot shower would be heaven after they’re scrubbed down and free to leave.  
  
They have a free day next. He’s planning to spend it tidying up his quarters, doing laundry and scrubbing down the shower that he’s been so diligently neglecting. Ashton strips out of his jumpsuit in the hallway between their main work area and the anti-bac chamber. He’s never been gladder to send the slippery silver fabric tumbling down the laundry chute. “Fuck, I’m so glad to be done for the week,” he tells Calum. They step into the chamber together, both in their underpants, and Calum’s outstretched arms quiver with the effort of keeping them raised as the disinfectant nozzles dart around them. Finally the robotic arms retreat to their hatches and the commons doors slide open.  
  
There’s a slight chill in the air that raises goosebumps across his exposed flesh. “You’re still coming, right?” Calum asks. It takes a moment for Ashton to respond; he doesn’t remember making plans until they reach their lockers and he steals a glance at the holo-calendar in the back of his own. And he feels like a shitty friend for forgetting plans like this; he’s just been so caught up in his own thoughts recently, worn down by the monotony of his job and then the constant pressure from Calum and his mum about his activation date creeping closer and closer.  
  
“Yeah,” he says, catching sight of his reflection in the dimly reflective surface and running fingers through his hair to fluff it up. And instead of getting on the mag-train home like he wants to, he catches the northbound train to the greenlawn with Calum. “You know, I think I might not go through with it,” he tells his best friend, meaning his activation. They sit together across from the back doors of the car and watch the adverts for an upcoming showing of ‘Titanic’ at the interactive theater. While Calum sits beside him silently he gnaws on a thumbnail and wonders whether it’s too late to get his money back.  
  
“You can’t go back on it now,” Calum tells him.  
  
And it’s true: His payment has already been processed, the credits removed from his profile. The invoice showed up in his e-net overnight and he’d added it to his encrypted folder. “It’s just - weird,” he says, weighing each of the words on his tongue before he speaks. “To be in charge of another person like that. I don’t want that responsibility.”  
  
Calum - true to form - stares at him blankly for a moment before responding. “It’s not the same,” Calum argues. “They can’t feel anything. It’s not like… It’s not the same as if you decided to give control of your life over to me. They can’t fight back.” But the tone of Calum’s voice is thin and uncertain; for a minute Ashton thinks that some of his bleeding-heart morality might have seeped beneath the skin’s surface along with Calum’s tattoos. “You can’t tell me you’re not at least excited to finally lose your virginity,” he says.  
  
“I don’t really think about it that much,” Ashton fibs.  
  
Because he has thought about it. Late at night when he’s restless and he can’t sleep, sometimes he thinks about having someone else in bed with him, someone else’s hands on him, doing whatever he wants them to - but then he comes and it’s over, the fantasy shattered by the wet slick of it spread across his thighs and belly. And it would be good to have someone sometimes that he could just… just to talk to, about his dumb and uncertain feelings and all the deeply blasphemous thoughts he has about the government and their society, someone who won’t tell him he’s wrong or that “This is just the way things are now.” Ashton has never accepted that as an excuse for the Partner program. He’s grateful for it - without his mother’s first Partner he wouldn’t have been born, after all - but sometimes he wishes for something real at the end of the road.  
  
He watches the other people in the train car interact with their Partners and wonders what people will think once he has one of his own. It’s impossible to know, isn’t it? Ashton would like to think he’ll be one of the good ones, considerate of his Partner’s obliviousness to the elements and whatever else may happen. The announcement comes on for the greenlawn station and he and Calum jump to their feet, weaving through the mid-afternoon crowd to the back door of the mag-train.  
  
“Come on, there’s not much time before the show starts,” Calum says. He drags Ashton along by the hand, past the row of greenhouses connected by underground tunnels toward the big amphitheater on the lawn. They choose a row of seats near the top. “Better to see the whole picture,” he explains. Down in the projection pod Ashton can make out the shadowy shapes of people getting the film queued up to play.  
  
He’s only been to a few of the interactive holo shows, but Calum had insisted on it as a treat to celebrate their upcoming Partnerships. “This one’s supposed to be a classic, isn’t it?” Ashton asks, gazing up at the domed ceiling of the amphitheater. The seats around them quickly fill up, first the ones nearest the top rows and then slowly down closer to the projection pod. Five minutes before the advertised start time of the film, small tablets pop out of the seat backs in front of them so they can place their orders for the concession stand. Ashton taps on the icons for popcorn and a large soda - he doesn’t care what kind, just wants the sweet fizzing carbonation to chase the fake butter taste of the popcorn down his throat. At two minutes to the hour the amphitheater’s completely full; people spill over into the aisles with their small children, spreading out blankets and unfolding chairs to take in the film from the grass.  
  
The bright lights go down as the projection starts up. All around them darkness envelops the theater, the only light dim starlight as the infamous text crawl displays above the projection pod. The text is bright yellow and Calum reads under his breath as the words scroll by. There’s a faint rushing of air above their heads as the spacecraft becomes visible above their heads, flickering slightly as it travels toward some far-off planet. Ashton holds his breath as the plot begins to unfold all around him. He almost forgets that he’s purchased popcorn until it arrives ten minutes into the film, brushing against his knee and nearly toppling over as the concession stand sends it up through an automated delivery slot built into the arms of the seats.  
  
They watch the film in a companionable silence, each munching on snacks noisily until the woman one row ahead of them turns to scowl and hush them both. Calum simply laughs, taking care to crumple the cellophane wrapper that had come with his nachos and cheese thoroughly before dropping it into the waste disposal unit underneath the row of seats ahead. Ashton’s too absorbed in the film to pay much notice to the people around them. He’s sure he drops some of his popcorn on the people in front a few times. By the end of the movie despite his aching body he’s in much better spirits with a belly full of over-salted popcorn and fizzy soda.  
  
“That was good,” he says as they walk out of the amphitheater, blinking hard against the bright lightpods hovering just beyond eye level. The greenlawn at night is beautiful, light glinting off the emerald green photo-glass of the greenhouses prettily and winking as the mag-trains rush by. He only regrets coming out for the show a little as they manage to catch the last mag-train headed south for the evening. The cars are all filled to capacity, swaying and jostling its passengers as it rushes along the steel tracks slower than usual to compensate for the weight of its cargo. Ashton and Calum both have to cling to the thick rubber hand-holds that drop down from the ceiling at peak hours, squaring their shoulders and planting their feed to avoid crashing into the people around them at every stop.  
  
By the time the mag-train spews most of its occupants out across the city it’s nearing midnight. Since there’s no one else getting off at his stop Ashton gets mobbed by hovering lightpods rushing toward him to light the way home; he bats at them as they bump against each other sluggishly. He wonders if their batteries are running low. Once he leaves the area directly surrounding the platform the lightpods disperse, tied to the confines of the mag-train platform. Some others hovering along the sidewalk float over to him, trailing lazily behind as he walks the short distance to his block. His quarters are on the second floor of a double-occupancy unit; he’s never met the downstairs neighbor aside from the few times she’s been walking up her stairs to street level at the same time he’s been walking down his. It’s a quiet block - none of the other units throw parties, mostly middle-aged people with families or else younger people like himself, too busy with work for anything else.

 

After they see ‘Star Wars’ at the interactive holo-theater, Calum and Ashton don’t have a free day again until their activation date. They’d planned it that way on purpose - Calum too excited and keyed-up to make the journey to BLITS alone, and Ashton too filled with self-doubt to go through with it unless he had someone to hold him accountable. He wakes up before his alarm for once. His stomach’s a mess of nerves and apprehension about what the day will bring; for half a moment he regrets not having anything to do with the endless stream of surveys and sims made available to him. It would be nice to have some idea of what to expect. So Ashton rises with the sun and stretches when he rolls out of bed, down the stairs to the kitchen where he gets himself a bowl of cereal and steaming mug of coffee from the beverage synthesizer. The day becomes a little more palatable once the coffee’s taken full effect. He pushes the hard grains around until they go soggy in the watered-down milk. If they taste like anything at all, Ashton doesn’t notice, chewing mechanically until the bowl’s empty before dumping the leftover milk into his disposal unit.

He sits down on the couch with his netportal for a while and re-reads the files BLITS had sent him overnight to prepare for the day’s events. Check-in starts at 0800 hours in the development lab to go over any last-minute changes he might want to make - not that there will be any for Ashton - and then at 0900 he’ll go upstairs to the eighth floor to start the activation process. Neither he nor Calum have been to the eighth floor yet. It’s the top floor of the building, double the height of any other floor in the laboratory facility. Everyone starts out on the second floor for neural processing throughout childhood; they get poked and prodded and measured, blood drawn to make sure they’re growing properly and genomes mapped for optimal results in the Partner program. Ashton still remembers the day his first technician went over the gene map with him, zooming in on parts of his double-helix model to explain what particular genes did.

He remembers the first day when he was fifteen and they’d showing him his Partner genome - the chromosomes that would best complement his and carry his most desirable traits forward to the next generation. It had astounded him, then, that a person could be simplified into something rendered on a holoscreen. Today he’s going to see the final result of a life-long process. Calum shows up on his doorstep at 0715, ready to leave for BLITS. They’re both dressed in plain colors; Calum beams at him broadly when he opens the door.

“You ready for this?” he asks, leaning against the narrow wrought-iron railing as Ashton thumbs out of his house, locking the door behind him.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Ashton replies. Which is to say, he’s not ready at all and he feels like everyone they pass on the way to the mag-train platform can tell. The early morning sun is pale and gray. There are only a handful of other people on the train when they board; a couple of kids that look to be in their secondaries skiving off classes for the day. He knows this because they’re on the northbound train toward the greenlawn and BLITS. The secondaries academy is on the southbound line on the opposite end of the city. It’s better than if they were alone on the train, though - if they were alone Calum would have a billion questions about Ashton’s Partner and he doesn’t know how to talk about it. He doesn’t really know what to say about the fact that he has no idea what to expect.

Without commuters getting on and off at every stop the mag-train ride feels altogether too short. “We’re here,” Calum says, bouncing on the balls of his feet with every step as they step out of the mag-train car at the BLITS platform. Ashton’s only anchored to the ground by Calum gripping onto his bicep tightly when they step inside the elevator. It all feels a bit surreal, lab employees bustling around them as the shifts swap from the overnights to the daytime staff. The development lab looks the same as always when they step off the metal plate in the elevator bay, right down to the same receptionist ready with their files and Dawson and Calum’s tech both ready to greet them as they arrive. The sight of Dawson is comforting; his buzzed hair is the same length as always, mouth pulled into a calm and reassuring smile while Ashton thumbs in at reception and signs the tablet without reading the terms and conditions.

Intake is short, sweet and to the point. It’s the last time they’ll be on this floor; a copy of everything in their files is sent up to the seventh floor full of file servers. Ashton looks around the development office for the last time, taking in the framed painting of yellow flowers in a vase hanging on the one wall, the action figures posed on the desk below the viewscreen. He looks everywhere but the tank, in fact, tipped lengthwise against the wall vertically waiting to be taken up to the eighth floor for activation. It’s good that the glass over the tank is still opaque; Ashton doesn’t think he could go through with it if he could see. In a little over an hour he’ll see the end result anyway. His stomach churns at that thought, and suddenly he’s glad he hadn’t eaten anything more substantial than cereal for breakfast.

Dawson goes through the drawers underneath his work surface and produces two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. “Thought you might need this today,” he says, pouring the dark liquid into both glasses with a mischievous grin on his face. “Liquid courage ’n all.”

“Thanks,” Ashton tells him. He takes the glass when it’s offered and sips it slowly, savoring the smooth earthy taste of the liquor. It helps to steady his nerves as he drinks.

For the last time they pull up his profile and the familiar routine of the full-body scan soothes the remainder of Ashton’s jangled nerves. He watches each of the vital organs light up as they’re scanned and checked for functionality. They don’t go into the editor at all; Dawson knows better than to ask him by now and he’d be far too tempted at this point to overwrite all his data in a panic. “Say goodbye to the tank,” Dawson tells him, squeezing his shoulder quickly before moving to the other side of the cramped office. Ashton helps him heave the tank into the loading bay. It’s heavier than it looks, gallons of nutri-gel and - according to the final body scan - one hundred eighty-five pounds of organic material. The glass has always looked delicate but now Ashton can see how strong it is; strong enough to sustain human life for years without shattering, made to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes and all manner of natural disasters.

In a way he’s going to miss the tank and how impersonal it made things. He can deal with a bigger glass tube in an endless array of the glass tubes that make up his world. He has to stand back while Dawson straps the tank in, throwing the metal door to the bay closed and latching it before he presses the big green ‘GO’ button. The button itself is an anachronism - a reminder of days past when everything was man-operated, a failsafe to ensure there are no early activations or aborted procedures due to a software malfunction. Ashton’s tank disappears from the development office with a sharp clank sound, propelled up two floors by a pneumatic system he doesn’t fully understand the workings of.

“Do you think you’ll have any regrets?” Dawson asks him once the loading bay is empty. He pours them each another glass of whiskey, this time to celebrate himself and a job well done. Ashton thinks about it and no - he won’t have any regrets.

He shakes his head, says, “I think I’ll be good.” At 0850 the viewscreen automatically logs them out of the system, replacing the diagnostics screen with the familiar BLITS logo bouncing back and forth. “I guess this is it, then,” Ashton says, sadder than he’d expected to see Dawson go. They shake hands awkwardly by the office door and Ashton’s about to leave for the eighth floor when Dawson looks uncomfortably like he’s having an emotion.

All he says when Ashton pushes the intake door open is, “Check your e-net tonight,” one eyebrow raised meaningfully. Only Ashton’s body is too thrumming with nerves again to make any meaning out of it; he files the thought away for later if he remembers and tries not to hold his breath once he’s stepped onto the elevator plate, alone with his thoughts in the chute. He tries to focus on the soft whoosh of the magnets lifting him up past the file servers, up to processing. He wishes he’d waited for Calum. Not that Calum’s presence would do anything to steady him at this point - he’s droopy and slack from the whiskey on an almost-empty stomach.

The eighth floor is a stark contrast to the rest of the building’s floors - large windows and open, airy spaces as opposed to tight, claustrophobic offices and narrow hallways. Ashton stands in the elevator bay and simply stares, unsure of where to go. It doesn’t take him long to realize that the majority of the floor is empty space; it’s designed to give off a warm, friendly feel to foster positive feelings upon arrival. Then the illusion is shattered as he notices the imprinting offices along the back wall and the processing pods lining the windows. He goes to the nearest processing window and sits down, waiting for an attendant to join him once he’s thumbed in and pressed his palm flat against the identi-glass to verify his identity.

The attendant is polite and patient with him. They go through the final retinal scan and Ashton signs some more files on a tablet, initialing in the correct boxes before passing it back over the worktop. He doesn’t catch the attendant’s name - she’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things, small and unassuming and anonymous - but his imprinting technician is an older man named Feldy, who’s not old exactly but just… weathered, maybe. “Good to meet you,” Feldy says, grasping Ashton’s outstretched hand and pumping it up and down firmly when they meet. He scans Ashton’s charts quickly and nods to himself. “I see that Dawson was your dev-tech… That’s good, he’s a good kid.”

“Yeah, I liked him,” Ashton agrees, unsure if he’s allowed to feel any particular way about his techs. The admission makes Feldy press his lips together for a brief moment and nod again before he boots up a viewscreen and logs in quickly. Up here the screens are all different: a bar with a line that jumps and falls steadily like a heartbeat, two ovals that grow and shrink rhythmically. Ashton suspects that this is a more advanced version of the vitals monitoring software that they used downstairs in the development lab. He’s trying to focus on the viewscreen so he doesn’t have to focus on the reality that today they’re going to open the tank up, today his Partner is going to become a real live person.

Well. As real as someone without the capacity to create original thoughts can be, anyway. The idea of it brings Ashton’s mood spiraling back down to reality. “Looks good so far,” Feldy says confidently, watching the screen. He pulls two pairs of paper-thin plastic gloves from a box on the desk and hands one pair to Ashton. There are rows of tiny glass bottles with rubber squeeze-stoppers in on the desk, too. The print on the labels is too small to read without squinting. In the larger space of the imprinting office - clean and white and impersonal, in use for one day only before being stripped down and sanitized - the tank looks too small, too.

Feldy touches the icons on the viewscreen in sequence. Ashton doesn’t know what any of them are for; he misses the comfortable familiarity of the development lab. The first one brings them to a different screen that simply displays a status bar. The second triggers a soft trickling noise from within the tank. The noise makes something in Ashton’s chest come undone, a relentless nervous fluttering that has him jiggling his knee while they wait for confirmation of - something. He doesn’t know what they’re waiting for. “Um,” he says, his voice deafening in the still silence of the white room. “What are we waiting for?”

“Just waiting for the tank to drain,” Feldy tells him, indicating the short plastic tube hanging from the base of the tank. The sickly amber liquid empties through the tube slowly. Ashton can’t imagine being encased in the viscous stuff, unable to move - for a minute he’s glad his Partner won’t be conscious until the very end, that he’s been in a peaceful state during the worst part of it. The status bar inches closer to a hundred percent slowly. As he works Feldy explains the rest of what he’s doing: “So once all the gel’s cleared we’ll get him a proper shower, clean the worst of the gunk off him, y’know? It’s just another tube in,” and he points at the pressure-wash tube hanging from the ceiling. “You know, most people opt to sit this part out,” Feldy says gently.

Ashton raises one shoulder in a defeated way and says, “Yeah, I guess I’m not most people. I don’t… I don’t want him to be alone or whatever. After being alone so long.”

“Why don’t you take a few minutes and grab some coffee? There’s a beverage port just down the hall. And bring me one too,” Feldy demands, waving him out of the room as the status bar hits ninety-five percent. Ashton steps out and locates the port easily enough, but it’s one of the old-style ones that’s a bit sluggish to start up, churning out a few ounces of coffee grounds before it starts spitting out liquid gold into the flimsy styro cups. He has to really press on the coffee icon to fill both cups; as an afterthought he grabs a handful of sweet-paks and jams them into his pocket.

By the time he returns to the imprinting office the status bar has reached one hundred percent and Feldy’s up on a step-stool above the tank, directing the spray of the pressure-wash tube. Ashton can see the suds draining out the bottom tube, rinsing away chunks of congealed nutri-gel. “Gross,” he mutters. The water runs clear eventually, at which point Feldy hangs the wash tube back on its hook and steps down from the stool. “Does it always do that? Congeal like that?” Ashton wants to know.

“As soon as it’s exposed to air, yeah,” Feldy confirms. “We used to lose a lot of ‘em that way, before they changed the formula. That was years ago now, though. Probably before you were even born,” he jokes, and Ashton scowls. He’s not that young; he knows he looks a little younger, he knows it’s unusual to peak his savings before twenty-five. He’s probably going to have to get used to the jokes. But Ashton doesn’t like the idea of losing any of them that way - trapped in a rapidly congealing nutri-gel, probably breathing it in and choking on it unless the techs were able to open the tank in time. It makes him slightly nauseous, the coffee he’s just finished drinking sloshing around in an unpleasant way.

Up here, there are robotic arms that come out of panels in the walls to turn the tank onto its side. Feldy controls them from the palm console on the desk, tilting the tank slowly until it’s horizontal once more and gently placing it onto the pedestal. An array of options pops up on the viewscreen once he’s done, the largest one a silver-bordered icon with red text that simply says ‘Initialize’. Like when he was a child, Ashton’s filled with the irrational need to push all the buttons and see what they do. “What’s all this?” he asks.

Feldy tells him as he touches the icons. “This retracts the feeding tube. That’s gotta go first or he’ll choke,” he explains, tapping the squiggly icon on the far left. “Next we have the ventilator. He’s been breathing on his own for a while, so that one’s not really a big deal. And this one,” Feldy says, tapping the icon furthest right, “This one’s gonna load your data sequences before we pull him from the tank. Before I push this, any last requests?” His finger circles the brain icon slowly, giving Ashton a chance to respond before he starts the upload. Ashton shakes his head ‘no’ and watches the screen light up with an endless sequence of ones and zeros after the upload begins. It’s weird to think that that’s his brain; he’s literally looking at a digital representation of his thoughts, his likes and dislikes, things he’s probably long forgotten that were stored away in some reptilian part of his brain.

The upload only takes a moment. One by one the numbers disappear from the viewscreen, leaving only ‘Initialize’ left to press. “Can I do this one?” Ashton asks, biting the inside of his cheek to try and curb any future impulsiveness.

“Yeah, go for it. I’ll have to do a couple things first, but as soon as I’m done you’ll get to see him.”

And Ashton feels knocked off-balance by that; it’s too soon and it’s been too long entirely, and for a second he doesn’t know if he can go through with it. What if he’s made a huge mistake by not having any input in the process? What if he’s unhappy with his results? Even if he is, he’s not sure he’d be able to send his Partner back for recalibration because it seems so… cruel. Inhumane. He feels a sudden surge of confidence and reaches out to tap the ‘Initialize’ icon before he has another change of heart. “Wow, okay,” he says, sitting back in his chair slowly. It feels like his legs would have given out from under him otherwise. There’s a loud, jarring noise as the hermetic seal on the tank breaks and the robotic arms lift the top of it off as though it were no heavier than a feather, pulling the heavy opaque glass away into yet another compartment hidden in the wall. It’s probably a direct chute to the recycling zone under the building, Ashton thinks.

He can’t help himself. When Feldy goes to the tank he follows after, straining to read the labels on the tiny vials he sets out on the metal procedure tray that’s set up next to the tank. The first thing he sees is how many wires and tubes go into the vitals monitoring system. Ashton can’t focus on anything else for a minute, stuck on the sheer number of electrodes and sensors. It’s so clinical he can almost understand how it’s easier to dehumanize Partners until their activation day. Now it’s all Ashton can see; the pale almost-translucent chest rising and falling with each breath, the fine hair on each limb… Once he takes the time to notice these small details he wonders if anyone else has ever stopped to do the same. While Feldy works he doesn’t breathe. And he knows that Feldy is talking, still chattering away as he moves fluidly through each procedure, but Ashton doesn’t hear him over the rushing beat of his heart.

The last thing that needs to be done is the eye drops. Ashton remembers it from the emails - written in an obnoxiously optimistic tone - and it seems to ruin the intimacy that there’s going to be another person present the first time they see each other. “Hey, uh,” Ashton goes, clearing his throat awkwardly before he speaks. “I want to do the eye drops,” he says. And Feldy’s white-gloved hands pause above the tank, poised with the tiny dropper ready to go. When he eases his grip on the rubber bulb the fat bead of clear liquid that had been gathering at the tip of the pipette rolls back into the glass tube slowly.

“Suit yourself,” Feldy says in a carefully even tone. Ashton suspects that this is probably a breach of some protocol; he’s careful when given the dropper, holding it between his fingertips like a bomb about to go off. The thick layer of gel protecting his Partner’s eyes is, admittedly, kind of gross-looking. It’s supposed to protect their eyes in the tank, keep them from becoming too dry. He sucks in a deep breath, trying to anchor himself before he faces the inevitability of the situation at hand. He focuses on the hardened layer of gel, squeezing the bulb gently to release a drop of solution. It makes a faint fizzing sound as it dissolves the protective seal. And he’s still trying so hard to stay objective about things. If he lets himself focus on something else his hands will start shaking. He applies six drops in total before the job is done. The next thing he’s aware of is the stark contrast between his Partner’s short dark lashes and pale skin - he wonders if it’ll tan after a while, if they spend some time in the sun together.

It’s a stupid and romantic thought to have. “Should I,” he starts, pulling his hands back to rest at his sides. “Should I do anything else?”

And Feldy’s back at the viewscreen, back turned to Ashton. There’s a lump in Ashton’s throat; he’s nervous, he wants to disappear instead of living through this moment. It’s simultaneously the most freeing moment of his entire life and sheer torture. “No, that’s it,” Feldy tells him.

“Will he…” Ashton doesn’t know how to say what he’s trying to express. His heart is pounding so loud his words sound like they’re coming out a whisper. Now that all the clinical things have been dealt with he’s forced to acknowledge his Partner’s humanness. It’s not what he had been expecting at all. He had expected to feel nothing; he’d expected a cold clinical feeling to loom over him like it had every time he’s come in for his development appointments.

Last time it was just - he was just - a thing in a tank with a barely-there pulse, pale and lifeless. Ashton can see his eyelids twitch subtly now as he wakes up, chest rising and falling slowly. He’s so real now. “Any minute now,” Feldy confirms. He’s going to wake up. The goosebumps on the backs of Ashton’s arms aren’t from the cold air coughing intermittently through the ventilation system. “You nervous?”

“Shit, yeah,” Ashton answers. He wonders if it’s just like waking up from a long nap - heavy and hazy, brain-addled from too much sleep. Tentatively, he rests his fingertips against the edge of the glass expecting it to feel warm and lifelike. It’s cold under his touch, smooth and unmarked. It doesn’t seem like something that should be able to sustain life inside it for so long. He takes this opportunity to just… look. This is what his brain and science had decided were the ideal Partner for him. And he’s surprised - he hadn’t thought he would be into redheads - but somehow not in the way he thought he would be. Mostly it feels like he’s on the precipice of something important.

He stands by the tank for a long time and nothing happens. At this point Ashton’s sure he has his Partner’s face memorized; he feels a little disheartened that nothing’s happened, little fingers of icy disappointment sliding down the back of his neck. He turns away for a moment, craning his neck to see what Feldy’s working on at the viewscreen - bleached-out hair bright against the harsh blue glow of the screen - and when he turns back his Partner’s awake, staring at him with wide springtime-green eyes. “Hi,” he says, voice rough and hoarse from years of disuse.

Ashton stares back at him, watching as his pupils contract, adjusting to the light. “Hi,” he replies, extending his hand stiffly for a handshake. It strikes him a moment later that it’s probably the wrong thing - but it’s too late to take it back, his Partner’s soft fingers closed loosely around his own. “I’m Ashton,” he introduces himself. Once he notices the way his own hands totally envelop his Partner’s, tanned skin over pale skin and curiously stubby fingers. They’re like baby hands, he thinks.

“Michael,” his Partner responds, still holding onto his fingertips. “You already knew that,” he says afterward, pulling his hand back meekly.

“I didn’t, actually,” Ashton tells him. It’s something he hadn’t freely admitted until now - how little involvement he’d had in this entire process, how up until this moment Michael had been little more than a stranger held in suspension to him - and once the words have left his mouth he feels a little freer than he had before. “I wanted to wait,” he says. “My friend Calum, he’s been obsessing over his Partner for ages but I didn’t want… I wanted to be surprised.” He doesn’t know if it’s something he’s allowed to talk about, really, but he needs to fill the silence.

“Why?”

And the simple question catches him off-guard. “Um,” he starts to say. He’s thankful to be cut off by Feldy coming over to deliver a pile of freshly-pressed white clothes from a cubby in the wall. “Thanks,” Ashton says. The worried look in his direction isn’t lost on him; Feldy avoids lingering for too long and Ashton isn’t sure what he’s done wrong. Did he mess up the imprinting process? A wave of sudden panic descends on him. “You should put these on,” he tells Michael, turning his back to face the viewscreen. He doesn’t know why he does, exactly, only that it feels improper to watch him dress since they’ve only just met.

A few minutes pass by before Feldy brings him a tablet to sign off on. Ashton skims the text quickly, initialing each of the boxes as indicated before scribbling an approximation of his usual signature at the end. “They’re expecting you in the processing office next,” Feldy tells him with a firm squeeze of his forearm. He leaves without further preamble, leaving Ashton completely alone with Michael for the first time in his life. It’s terrifying. He doesn’t know how to be in charge of anything, yet. This is going to be the longest day of his life, in this building going from office to office putting the pieces of his future together.

“I guess we should probably head over there,” Ashton says, more for his own benefit than anything else. Out of instinct he reaches for Michael’s hand and a moment later he’s glad he did, because Michael is as clumsy as a newborn deer learning to walk. He stumbles over the smallest cracks in the tile floors; more than once on the short walk over to processing Ashton has to reach out and steady him before he trips and hurts himself. The processing office is even colder than the imprinting one had been. It’s the same headache-inducing shade of white and clinical, with the only furniture in sight a long narrow examination table covered in crinkly waxed paper and a single, hard-backed plastic chair.

Their time in the processing office is brief; a young, nameless doctor comes and marks off a few things on a tablet efficiently. He shines a penlight in both of Michael’s eyes, raps his knees with a small rubber mallet to test his reflexes. Once that’s done the doctor tells Ashton they’re free to go and calls a hovercar for them. It’s standard procedure; Ashton understands why now, after seeing Michael stumbling around rubber-limbed and squinting against the bright fluoro lights. He understands a lot of things more now that he’s experiencing them first-hand and he likes the Partner program even less than he did before.

 

The hovercar ride passes by in a blur. Ashton’s only been inside one a few times before; his mum had always scoffed at the people who owned personal hovers, claiming they were too wasteful, too extravagant for everyday use. The hovercar driver is a gruff, anonymous-looking man who closes the flight door after them and waits until he’s made sure that Michael’s buckled in safely before taking off. It has a partition between the driver’s compartment and the backseat. There’s a small sliding door that Ashton can open if he wants. He leaves it shut, content for the moment to look out the window at the city below. New Sydney sprawls out beneath them, a maze of tall building spires and industrial factories belching smoke out into the afternoon. Everything is glittery and pristine from so high up - it’s a jarring contrast from how sterile and sanitized everything seems at ground level. Ashton can even see the mag-train tracks weaving their way across the city. He wonders if Calum remembers the promise they’d made to go to the greenlawn theater together after their activations.

Calum had already been gone by the time Ashton and Michael made it to the hovercar bay. Ashton hadn’t really expected him to hang around afterward - all he’s talked about for the past week is how he’s going to lose his virginity - but being alone immediately makes the whole experience feel kind of sour. He wants the calm familiarity of his best friend to settle his nerves a bit. Michael stares out the window the whole time, never having seen the city before. The hovercar interior is dim, the windows tinted to block the harsh ultraviolet radiation from the sun - both to prevent the heat and light from baking passengers’ skin and to protect the delicate eyes of newly-activated Partners. When they go out later in the week Michael will have to wear the dark BLITS-issued sunglasses until his eyes adjust to the sunlight and bright fluoros. It doesn’t take as long to get to Ashton’s block without stopping at every mag-train platform; he’s used to it taking half an hour or longer to get home from BLITS.

When the hovercar drifts to a stop and slowly descends to street level he’s surprised to see his own quarters. The driver opens the flight doors for them and stands by politely, watching as Ashton leads Michael up the stairs. “Thank you,” he calls over his shoulder, pausing to wave to the woman who lives downstairs before pressing his thumb to the doorhandle. The lock, predictably, springs open immediately and his front door whooshes open efficiently. “So… This is my place,” Ashton says awkwardly, watching Michael’s face for any hint of emotion. Unsurprisingly, his face is as blank and emotionless as it had been when they’d departed BLITS labs. He drops the carrier bag the processing department had left him with - changes of clothes for Michael, vita supplements for him to take during the transitional period, a few other things he hadn’t cared to pay attention - onto the floor carelessly, figuring he can go through it later once his brain un-fuzzes from the information overload of the day.

As soon as the bag hits the floor Michael picks it up and hangs it by the strap from the coat rack in the front hallway.

“Why’d you do that?” Ashton asks, annoyed. It was fine where it was. He feels like he’s being scolded, like he’s a little kid again and his mum is upset with him for leaving toys out on the living room floor.

“Not supposed to leave things on the floor,” Michael says, blinking at him in confusion. He straightens the bag on its hook, dragging his fingertips along the wall as he moves from the front hallway into the main living space. Ashton wonders if he even realizes - if he even knows what he’s doing, mindlessly shifting things until they’re perfectly aligned, picking up discarded sweets wrappers from the carpet and dropping them down the disposal chute. It makes him feel irrationally chided, like he’s doing something wrong by living in his own space. Part of him wants to scream already. He didn’t ask to be saddled with this gigantic man-child picking up after him and watching his every move. The intent staring is… unnerving.

“I’m just going to,” he says, desperate to get away from the suffocating feelings. He waves his hands vaguely in the direction of the couch and holoscreen. And he sinks down onto the couch despite the soft crunch of the pleather upholstery every time he shifts positions on it. Ashton thinks that he’d rather watch the mindless afternoon net-dramas than try to make sense of his life right now. It takes a significant amount of self-control to force himself to watch the entire hour of beautiful, airbrushed men and women play out their paltry disputes instead of trailing after Michael feeling frustrated every time he moves something on the counters or rearranges the fucking throw pillows. Not that Ashton actually owns throw pillows, but the sentiment is there all the same.

He sits through all of ’10 Seconds Or Less’ before he grows bored with the program - there are only so many giggling ten second product descriptions he can watch - and he leans back against the couch cushions, flicking through the feeds idly. Even with the volume turned all the way up he can still hear Michael meandering through the house moving things around. It’s irksome; he’s a creature of habit and he doesn’t like things changing. He grits his teeth and loads the next episode of ’10 Seconds’ from the cloud.

Ashton hadn’t expected to feel so self-conscious about the dirty underwear on his bedroom floor or the unwashed bowl in the sink. His breaking point comes when he hears the kitchen faucet on; it’s been leaky for a while, spurts water all over the counters, and he doesn’t expect Michael to do that. “Hey,” he says, leaning against the counter. “Be careful with that, it kind of…” And Michael doesn’t pick up on the implication from his words. He freezes up and stares at Ashton without blinking.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

“It’s okay,” Ashton says automatically. He reaches over Michael’s hands hovering in midair above the sink and jiggles the tap until water stops spraying onto the counter. “You just have to kind of… jiggle it until it stops leaking. I’ve been meaning to fix it for ages, honestly.” Sensing the internal struggle - Michael keeps looking from the half-full sink of soapy water to the puddle rapidly spreading across the counter - he sucks in a deep, centering breath and grabs the towel hanging over the handle of the oven door. It soaks up most of the water once he spreads it out and pats the absorbent fabric lightly.

Michael seems to snap out of the feedback loop after that; he goes back to mindlessly tidying the house and Ashton watches another hour of ’10 Seconds’ to pass the time. He hadn’t expected something as small as helping with the kitchen tap to affect his Partner so much. It’s almost frightening that Michael can’t operate outside of these tightly controlled parameters. Ashton wonders how far he could push the boundaries - if Michael can only do what he’s told or whether over time he could learn to pick up on subtle hints through experience. The couple on ’10 Seconds’ try to explain their concept drawing of a urine-powered jetpack and fail, the clock running out long before they’ve managed the idea they’re trying to convey. Only one idea makes it to the design phase this episode - a tablet charger that draws power from your body heat - and the team manages to complete their prototype before the ten minute mark. It’s a neat idea, really.

“Come look at this,” he tells Michael. He has to rewind the feed a few minutes, feeling stupid as he always does with the holo-glove on, twisting his hand clockwise in midair until he finds the beginning of the segment. “This is the coolest thing,” he says, snapping his fingers to start the feed. On the holo, Nick Grimshaw quickly recaps the episode before throwing to the creators of the tablet charger and they explain it once more in 9.4 seconds. The judges unanimously decide to move them on to the next round, where they have ten minutes to requisition the materials needed to make their prototype and then an additional ten minutes to build a working model. Michael stands next to the couch watching the feed with disinterest.

“What is this?” he asks, hands clasped neatly behind his back.

Ashton pauses the feed to explain. “It’s like this reality show competition? You get ten seconds in front of the judges to explain your idea and then if you get past the judges you can try to build a working design in ten minutes. They give you a hundred thousand credits if you do it,” he tells Michael, who looks unfazed by this information. “They give the people who don’t make it past the judges a thousand credits just for being on the show. It’s kind of stupid, but it’s an easy way to earn some extra credits.” He resumes the feed and they watch as the team scrambles to build a working conductive tablet charger, successfully managing to power on a tablet with a dead battery at the seven minute mark.

The credits roll and Michael goes, “Okay then,” and starts going back to - whatever he’s doing, sorting Ashton’s t-shirts by fabric and color probably. Ashton sighs, frustrated and annoyed by how things are going. And apparently Michael only has one setting - one of the posters on the wall is slightly askew and he shifts the frame until it’s perfectly aligned. How he’s going to tolerate a full week of this Ashton has no idea. It’s only been one afternoon and he’s already feeling suffocated, ready to take the mag-train back to BLITS and say he’s made a mistake. But he owes it to Michael, at least, to try and make this work.

“Come sit down,” he says. He hopes that his tone sounds more authoritative than it feels; he feels like his voice sounds strained and hollow. And to emphasize his point he pats the couch cushion beside him, lazily scrolling through the holo feeds until he finds something he wants to watch. ‘Duality’ sounds promising - he hasn’t heard of any of the actors in it, but the tag line reads ‘Everyone has a dark side’ ominously and the guide promises that the film is a modernized adaptation of classic horror writer Stephen King’s ‘The Dark Half’. The couch sags slightly under Michael’s weight when he sits. It’s weird for Ashton how he holds himself in at all times - long legs angled away, crossed at the ankles, and his small pale hands clasped neatly in his lap. It feels like the opposite of what should be. With legs that long he should have his legs spread, one leg kicked out slightly in the gap between the couch and coffee table.

The beginning of the film is dull; it’s all wide panoramic shots of people dressed in white doing everyday things set to quiet classical music. Ashton tries to get into it but he’s too aware of Michael sitting next to him, drawn into himself but staring at Ashton instead of the holoscreen.

“What,” Ashton goes, wondering if maybe there’s something on his face. He touches at his hair self-consciously.

“You told me to sit down,” Michael says. The look on his face is so clearly confused that Ashton can’t find it in his heart to be annoyed.

If he thought that Michael could grasp the concept of personal autonomy things would be so much easier, Ashton thinks. “You can watch the movie,” he says finally. “It’s a little weird when you just go around cleaning things like that.” He doesn’t know how to explain that he likes things comfortably cluttered without sounding like a complete slob, so he leaves it at that. Once the film really gets going he manages to relax a little bit despite Michael’s rigid posture and constant glances over at him. In the midst of George Stark stalking the film’s protagonist, Ashton thinks about the weirdness of the day.

He wonders if Calum is faring better with his own Partner - he’d been so excited to finally lose his virginity that it’s probably over and done with by now - and he sort of feels like a failure for making so little progress. Michael’s so drawn in on himself, so perfectly obedient and earnest in his desire to please Ashton that he’s sitting and watching what turns out to be a truly bizarre film. It’s clear that the screenwriters had thrown all shreds of a coherent plot to the wind halfway through - and still Michael’s watching the holoscreen, glancing at Ashton to make sure he’s doing the right thing periodically. They’re condemned to a week of this to promote bonding and partnership, but to Ashton it feels like a prison sentence. He doesn’t like being confined to his quarters under normal circumstances. Damn his morals straight to hell, honestly.

Long before he’d had the credits to apply for Partnership Ashton had accepted that he would most likely spent his life either celibate or unfulfilled sexually. Something about the idea of sex with the husk of a person doesn’t appeal to him; he would feel differently if Michael could give consent based on his own desires rather than the ingrained compulsion to do whatever Ashton tells him to do. Even though his Partner is undeniably attractive to him, it’s a dead passion based solely on physical attributes. Which is why he doesn’t agree with BLITS and their ideals. He needs more than just physical companionship to be happy. If it were just about that he could find it with Calum and they wouldn’t have had to spend fifty thousand credits apiece just to have their Partnership applications processed. And even now it hasn’t been finalized; at the end of the one-month trial period Ashton will have his final assessment with a social worker and after that BLITS will check up on them every six months to ensure Michael hasn’t defected.

No one talks about what happens to defected Partners. It’s something that is very much swept under the rug. Every once in a while there will be a clip on the news about someone’s Partner going rogue, strangling them in their sleep only to be found sobbing next to the bed motionless the next day. He’s seen the med-evac trucks outside one of the units the next block over, seen the black-suited handlers escorting an unresponsive Partner out with her wrists bound behind her in zipcuffs. No matter how he feels personally, he doesn’t want that to happen to Michael. Human beings aren’t disposable.

So he tolerates it when the film ends and Michael wanders off to the kitchen. A while later appetizing smells start wafting into the main living space, followed by a slight burnt aroma. Ashton grits his teeth and smiles when he walks in to find faint tendrils of smoke rising from the stovetop. “I’m making dinner,” Michael tells him.

“Thank you,” Ashton says.

It’s going to be a difficult week, he thinks later. He can stomach the taste of burnt food. After a while even the unfamiliar sounds of Michael doing things fades into background noise; Ashton spends the evening hours doing mindless brain teasers on his netportal to distract himself. There’s only so much sudoku he can do before growing bored, however. Maybe going to bed early will serve him well. He finds Michael in the laundry room sitting cross-legged on top of the dryer. Michael’s not doing anything, just sitting there while the dryer runs.

“I’m going to bed,” Ashton tells him.

“Okay,” Michael replies.

“You should probably go to bed too,” Ashton realizes. He lingers in the doorway for a minute, marveling at the empty space where his mountain of unwashed clothes had used to be. Maybe having Michael around isn’t such a bad thing after all.

“I don’t need to sleep,” Michael says.

That settles that, then. Feeling defeated, Ashton shrugs and goes, “Okay. Good night,” and goes to the bedroom before he can make himself feel foolish again. He keeps forgetting that Michael’s not the same as other people. He’s like… a houseplant, or something, the kind you don’t need to water that still blooms in the spring and summer. A succulent, they’re called. It’s a little depressing to think that his Partner and a goddamn cactus are interchangeable. Ashton ends up tossing and turning all night, waking up for every noise before falling back into a restless sleep. He couldn’t really say what he dreamed about; he’s not sure if he stays asleep long enough to enter into a dream cycle.

 

The rest of the week passes by slowly and without incident.

Ashton feels tense and irritable, fit to burst at any moment with all of his bottled-up anxiety after days of having someone trail behind him cleaning up after him. He’s starting to feel mean and spiteful. He’s glad when Monday comes and wakes up at the first klaxon wail from his alarm clock, sliding out of bed to take a shower so he can avoid Michael until it’s time to leave for work. The hot water helps to work some of the tension out of his neck and shoulders; he takes an overly long shower until the hot water runs cold. It would be better if he could massage out the muscle knots, but there’s no time for that. He pulls on the first clothes out of his drawers, figuring he’ll have time to shove his travel mug under the beverage synthesizer before he has to catch his mag-train down at the platform.

“I’m going back to work today,” he tells Michael. And he feels a little more endeared to his Partner when he notices his mug on the counter, already full of coffee and just waiting for him to sweeten it. Ashton could kiss him. It’s a proven fact that Mondays are the worst day of the week, so having his coffee already dealt with makes things a tiny bit more bearable than they would be otherwise. “Thanks for making coffee,” he says gratefully, depressing the triple shot button on his sugar dispenser before adding creamer and stirring it quickly. Some of the hot liquid slops out onto the counter; out of habit Ashton reaches for a towel to wipe it up.

Michael stops him, says, “Don’t worry about it, I’ve got it,” and cleans it up for him. It’s hard not to feel a little miffed; Ashton can clean up his own damn messes if he wants to. He chews the inside of his cheek to stop from saying something childish, from starting a fight about something Michael won’t understand because of his own frustration. This Partnership is truly an exercise in patience for him - and if maybe he had been ignoring it before now, his shortcomings in that department are definitely coming to light.

The coffee definitely helps. “I should probably go soon,” he says. “I’ll be back this afternoon.”

Being out of the house is good. Ashton enjoys the short walk to the mag-train platform. There’s already a small cluster of people waiting for the next one; it’s not quite yet rush hour so there will definitely be seats available. A pang of guilt hits him when he sees another guy about his age with his Partner - a young-looking woman with dark hair - clearly on their way to BLITS labs. The guy looks annoyed. One of the veins in his neck is clearly tensed up, his hands at his sides clenched into fists. It looks like he’s barely containing his anger and Ashton has the sudden urge to run home and apologize to Michael for being so short with him all week. The woman’s white clothes look dingy and unkempt. Something’s clearly wrong. Like he’s expected to, Ashton turns away, unwillingly turning a blind eye to a flaw in the system he can’t afford to question.

He feels out of sorts for the three stops until Calum joins him on the train. Seeing Calum after a week feels like a breath of fresh air; he’s pleased to see that Calum’s grinning, practically glowing as he plants himself in the seat next to Ashton. “Hey buddy,” Calum says, knee jiggling excitedly as he sits. “How was your week?”

“I think I’ve seen every episode of ’10 Seconds or Less’ now,” he laments.

And it’s clearly not the answer Calum was expecting, because his face falls a bit and a look of friendly concern takes over. “What happened? I thought your dev tech said you were on a really good track. Is… Is something wrong?” he asks, eyebrows arched high on his forehead.

“No, it’s nothing like that,” Ashton reassures him. He wants the focus taken off of him immediately, doesn’t want anyone to scrutinize him right now. “I’m just not used to having someone do everything for me, you know? Anyway, tell me about Luke.” Under other circumstances perhaps Calum would bristle at the way he deflects concern and changes the subject without much comment, but this morning Calum noticeably perks up at the change in conversation topic. Ashton only half-listens as he talks animatedly about his Partner - he’s still staring intently at the angry guy and his possibly defecting Partner, wondering if he’s going to be condemned to the same fate. It’s nerve-wracking because he’ll only ever have this one.

The most that BLITS can do is rewrite Michael’s personality if he has a problem with that. And Ashton doesn’t see the point in doing that: Partners already have such a limited sense of free will and autonomy that overwriting it with the same thing arranged in a different order seems stupid. It’s the same as the value brand versus the corporate-run brands at the requisition depot. They’re the same product inside, just packaged differently. He doesn’t want to burst Calum’s bubble, though - Calum seems genuinely happy and fulfilled to have finally gotten his Partner. And so Ashton wonders if maybe there’s something wrong with him - if he’s somehow fundamentally flawed for not wanting this - but there’s no time to wonder before the mag-train pulls up to their platform and he has to stumble after Calum. He loses the train of thought in between stripping down to his underwear in the cold commons and the anti-bac chamber misting him once-twice-three times before he suits up.

He hates the slick silver jumpsuit a little more today than usual; he’s gotten complacent after a week of jeans and soft t-shirts. “Look at this place,” he mutters, eyeing the stack of boxes by his workstation warily. The last time he’d come back from vacation it had taken him three days to clear the backlog left by the temporary replacements. Today time passes quickly, tube after tube scanned and sent up in the chute without issue. He likes the mindlessness of his work. After a while he lets his mind wander; what’s Michael doing at home, he wonders, should he have… left some chores undone, made a mess intentionally that he’d have to clean up? It is a little fucked up to think about. He probably shouldn’t worry about it so much.

During one of their scheduled breaks, he asks Calum, “So what is Luke gonna do all day while you’re here?”

“I don’t know,” Calum says. “Why should I care?” He tears the cellophane wrapper off the sandwich he’d bought from the vending machine and bites into it, chewing noisily with his mouth open. And Calum doesn’t seem bothered by the idea of his Partner sitting at home all day with nothing to do. He’s so self-absorbed that Ashton wonders whether he realizes the Earth doesn’t actually revolve around him. As an afterthought Calum adds “Why? What are you making - what’s his name again?”

“His name is Michael,” Ashton sighs. “And I’m not making him do anything. I don’t… I mean, what is there for him to do? All he does is follow me around and pick up after me. It’s driving me crazy.” It’s such a privileged complaint that he immediately feels guilty for making it. Especially when his own father had defected when he was six years old and he’d spent most of his childhood having to pick up after himself and his siblings every day. He wants to take his foot and shove it in his mouth, take the words back. It feels like shit. He’s acting like the kind of person he promised himself never to be.

Thankfully Calum doesn’t seem to notice. “Well, we could go catch the next ‘Star Wars’ this weekend if you want to get out of the house,” he suggests. And he starts chattering excitedly about Darth Maul versus Darth Sidious, but Ashton isn’t paying attention to the conversation anymore. It’s a dead-end conversation; Calum’s too satisfied with his new life to question anything. They go back through the anti-bac chamber and suit up again for the last half of their shift. Ashton puts in his earpod to avoid stilted, awkward conversation and tunes in to the classic rock hits station.

He’s not a huge fan of the cheery-voiced announcer between songs, but at least she isn’t telling him he’s supposed to be happy before bumping an early 2000’s Green Day hit. After a while he doesn’t even realize time is passing. He’s just focused on check and scan and chute, watching the numbers on his viewscreen steadily climb as he unintentionally has a record-breaking stats day because he’s trying to avoid thinking about what he’s going home to. For once when the shift change tone bellows he doesn’t feel relieved to be leaving. He strips out of his jumpsuit and shoves it into the laundry chute, eager to get into his street clothes. Standing in his underwear always makes him feel so exposed, especially in the commons where all of the office staff linger after their shifts, talking amongst themselves.

Normally he’d wait for Calum by their lockers, but by the time he gets to their lockers Calum’s already dressed and on his way to the mag-train platform. “I’ve gotta get home,” Calum says apologetically. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

And… Of course Calum wants to get home where there’s probably a hot meal waiting for him on top of guaranteed sex whenever he wants it. Ashton nods, pretending to understand that drive. “Yeah, sure,” he agrees. “See you.” He pauses by his locker for longer than it’s probably necessary. He wants to wait for the next mag-train, pretend he’s got things of his own to do when in reality he’s probably going to get home and watch reruns of ‘Recollection’ until he catches up to the current season. It’s rush hour when he gets on the mag-train so he has to stand, arm looped through one of the flexi-plast rings that drops down during peak transit times. The train ride is noisy and full of commuters; Ashton sways with the movement of the train car automatically, watching the adverts flicker on the opaque surfaces without really taking them in.

By the time he steps off the train the sun is low in the sky. The lightpods haven’t activated yet, still sitting motionless atop the bollards that charge them during the day. It’s almost peaceful walking the short distance home without a cluster of lightpods chasing after him. When he thumbs over the lock on the front door it swishes open effortlessly, greeting him with the smell of cleaning products and slightly burnt chicken. It amuses him, a bit. After all, BLITS is constantly advertising the Partner initiative as perfection, and here he is with a Partner who burns dinner and slams his knees into the corners of things constantly.

“I’m home,” he says.

Michael pokes his head out from the kitchen looking… Well, as sheepish as someone with a limited range of facial expressions can, really. “I made dinner,” he announces, like the spatula in one hand wouldn’t have given that away. Ashton can’t find it in his heart to make a snarky comment - Michael wouldn’t understand it, anyway.

He mentally kicks himself for lining his shoes up on the mat when he takes them off. “Um, thanks,” he says awkwardly. “What did you do today?”

“Waited for you to get home,” Michael says. And the frank way he says it - like it’s this normal thing, like his existence is supposed to revolve around Ashton - is heartbreaking. He pauses in the middle of flipping one of the chicken breasts in the pan and asks, “You don’t like me, do you?” It comes out in a bored monotone which Ashton has figured out is just his default setting - never happy, never sad - and at first he doesn’t know how to respond. It doesn’t matter, in the long run. A moment later a plume of smoke rises out of the frying pan unexpectedly, setting off the smoke alarm. The alarm shrieks loudly over Michael’s surprised squawk. Since thirty seconds pass after the alarm starts without anyone putting the smoke out - Michael’s frozen in place staring at it with wide eyes and Ashton’s too startled to take quick action - the sprinklers come on, covering everything with a fine mist to put out the non-existent flames.

Ashton sneezes once the mist settles. “Um,” he says, glancing around the kitchen and the now-ruined food, “I hate to say it, but I think we’ll have to order in tonight.” He’s already thinking about where he left his tablet, whether he wants pizza or Indian food, when he notices the devastated look on Michael’s face. He asks, “Hey, what’s wrong?”

“You can hit me if you want,” Michael tells him matter-of-factly. Almost like he’s expecting it to happen, really.

Which, what the fuck. “No,” Ashton says quickly. “I’m not… I’m not mad.” He can’t imagine hitting Michael over something, no matter how frustrated or annoyed he might get at times. But Michael’s still staring at him like he’s expecting it to come out of nowhere, so Ashton reaches over and takes the spatula he’s still holding and drops it into the soapy dishwater. “I’m not going to hit you, Michael. You didn’t do anything wrong. Come on, let’s order pizza or something, I’m starving.” It feels like he’s supposed to do something here, but he can’t figure out what it is and he ends up walking away instead in search of his tablet.

The tablet, predictably, is on the bedside table where he’d left it after reading his favorite humor sites before bed. When he comes back down from the bedroom Michael is busying himself with the kitchen, looking slightly distressed. Ashton thinks for a minute about asking him if he has any requests for the pizza toppings - pizza probably being less mind-boggling than Indian food would be, given Michael’s range of acceptable topics of conversation - and then shrugs. He doesn’t want to break his Partner twice in the same night. Instead he sits atop on of the bar stools pushed up against the counter and taps through the Pizza Planet app to order two large pizzas. Once his notification center pings to confirm that his order’s been accepted he flips through the news feeds idly, rotating his stool back and forth with his foot against the cupboard.

“You don’t like me,” Michael says again. “Are you going to send me back?” Ashton looks up from his tablet briefly. He knows he’s not an easy person to live with, figure out his whims, and he’s sure it’s frustrating for Michael not knowing what’s expected of him. It’s just… It’s kind of hard going from an independent person to letting someone else do things for him. But Michael keeps staring at him expectantly, eyes narrowed.

“I’m not going to send you back,” Ashton sighs. And before he can say anything else about it the doorbell chimes, alerting him to the fact that his pizza’s arrived. It’s pre-paid so all he has to do is open the door and press his thumb to the delivery drone’s touchscreen. Once he’s done that, the hatch on the drone hisses before swinging open so he can retrieve his still-warm pizzas. Before the Crash things used to be delivered by actual human beings, Ashton remembers suddenly. It’s more efficient to have the computerized drones that dominate the postal service hired out to do menial tasks; they travel faster than the average hovercar. Plus, the corps had had to find some use for the leftover drones after the Crash.

Ashton brings the pizza into the kitchen and sets the boxes down on the counter. “I could have made something else,” Michael says. His voice is whiny and petulant; Ashton wonder if he’s annoyed. Then he remembers that Partners can’t feel annoyed and chastises himself for ascribing meaning that isn’t there again. He keeps doing that.

“Just eat the pizza,” Ashton tells him. He opens one of the boxes and picks a slice of the Hawaiian pizza. It’s good - succulent ham and sweet, leaky pineapple - and without thinking he makes a pleased noise in the back of his throat when he takes the first bite.

Michael watches him eat the first slice suspiciously. Once he’s ascertained that the pizza is, in fact, edible he takes his own slice and considers it for a moment. Ashton watches him fold the pizza in half vertically, wonders where that particular habit came from. He unfolds the slice when he realizes that Ashton isn’t copying the motion, looking cowed and bashful. “Sorry,” he mumbles.

“No, it’s okay. Eat it however you want to.” Ashton doesn’t know how to explain that there’s no correct way to eat pizza. Silently, he folds his own slices in half until Michael follows suit and he just eats it like that, feeling slightly self-conscious. Between the two of them they finish both pizzas quickly - the only thing left over is the crusts, which were a little too dry for Ashton’s liking - and it feels like a minor battle’s been won. As they’re leaving the kitchen, Ashton notices the pizza sauce on Michael’s chin. “Hey, hold on a second.”

He realizes he should have been more direct in his word choice a second later when Michael freezes, completely obedient.

“Um, no, you’re not in trouble,” Ashton reassures him. “You’ve just… got some pizza sauce. Here, I’ll get it,” he says, wiping it away with his thumb quickly. He hates the way Michael flinches away from him - which is why he hasn’t tried to initiate anything, any kind of touch before now - so he tries to keep it gentle. When he pulls his hand back he feels stupid for the gesture, like he’s done something wrong by crossing some boundary he hadn’t known existed. And yet when they settle in the living room to watch a rerun of last week’s episode of ‘Recollection’ he’s got the feeling of Michael’s skin dragging under the pad of his thumb stuck in his brain. How is he going to get Michael to feel comfortable around him when Michael has no sense of personal comfort?

Even just sitting on the couch Michael’s body language is stiff and withdrawn. “I don’t understand this show,” he says halfway through the episode, bewildered at the main character’s apparent lack of self-preservation. He’s got his legs drawn up to his chest on the other side of the couch, staring at the holoscreen wide-eyed. “Why isn’t his Partner stopping him?”

“Would you?” Ashton asks, flicking his wrist to turn the volume down so their voices can be heard over the show. “I mean, doesn’t breaking and entering go against your…” He pauses, considering his words carefully. “Your moral code, or whatever? Plus you have to keep in mind he doesn’t remember any of the things he’s done in the past. It’s not as simple as ‘Johnson’s doing something wrong so I need to tell him to stop.’ Like, if he finds out what he was involved in before maybe he can stop the killings and clear his own name.”

Michael lets out a little huff and crosses his arms. “I still don’t understand,” he informs Ashton. Honestly, Ashton hadn’t been expecting him to understand. It’s a source of endless frustration during these enforced bonding sessions he’s trying to do.

Frustrated, sore from a long day of sorting mail and a little harassed from the lack of privacy, Ashton says, “You know you can do other stuff during the day, right? When I’m not here? You could, like, read a book or something. I don’t know how you aren’t bored as hell sitting here all day waiting for me to come home.” It comes out sounding a little more cross than he’d intended it to. He waits through an entire advert before trying to make up for it. “Here,” he says, pushing his tablet into Michael’s hands. “You can do pretty much anything on this, so if you want…”

“Okay.”

He had been expecting a fight about it - he doesn’t know why, Michael’s been conditioned to avoid disagreements - so he deflates a bit at that. “Are you, um. Are you… allowed… to read?” he asks, twisting his hand in the holo-glove to pause the live feed.

One of Michael’s shoulders lifts in a shrug. “No,” he admits, lips a tight line on his face.

“Right.” Ashton’s glad the lights dim automatically when the holoscreen is on. If the lights weren’t turned off Michael would be able to see how red his face has gotten, how stupid and embarrassed he feels for not knowing that. And he doesn’t know why he cares what Michael thinks of him - if Michael thinks of him in that way at all - but it seems important somehow that he save face and maintain his position as the one in charge. With another flick of the holo-glove he starts the feed and they sit in silence through the end of last week’s episode and then all of this week’s.

He wishes things could be as neat and compartmentalized as they are in the world of ‘Recollection’. Johnson and Sam have it so easy, he thinks. All they have to do is survive until the next episode. And anyway, Johnson likes his Partner and, like, it doesn’t matter for them that Sam’s defecting because they’re on the run from the law. It’s pure fantasy lived out in 1080p so the average proletariat gets their slice of casual rebellion without the drive to go out and rebel themselves. Media like ‘Recollection’ keeps the cogs turning smoothly in their tracks. At the end of the episode Michael’s still as closed-off as he had been before, curled around himself protectively.

Ashton rises from the couch, not actually tired enough to sleep but wanting to escape the awkwardness of the situation. “I’m going to bed,” he says, making a point to leave his tablet on the coffee table. “You can… If you wanted to borrow my tablet and do whatever, I’m okay with that.”

He scurries off to the bedroom before he can say anything else that makes him want to put his foot in his mouth. Anyway, he’s got his netportal in his room if he wants to read the humor feeds before he goes to bed. To muffle the sounds from the downstairs he flicks on the viewscreen across from his bed and chooses a marathon of the classic sitcom ‘F.R.I.E.N.D.S.’, not that he’s ever seen it or cares much what happens in it. Somehow he gets sucked into the world of Ross and Rachel despite this, ends up rooting for them to end up together a few episodes in while he dicks around on his netportal in bed. Around the time the battery on his netportal starts to die is the same time he’s finally tired enough to fall asleep, so he sets it aside figuring it will die on its own time.

 

Ashton wakes in the middle of the night from a bad dream that has him startled and uncomfortable. There’s still the niggling feeling of failure at the back of his head. He needs to figure out how to communicate with Michael in a way that makes sense. He lies in bed in the dark for a while trying to go back to sleep, but the unsettled feeling from the dream has stuck with him and refuses to leave. Groggily he reaches under his spare pillow for his netportal and flips it open, expecting it to flare to life instantly. Then he remembers it had been at low battery before he’d fallen asleep and grumbles to himself about it for a bit, trying to work up the energy to crawl out of bed in search of the charger. The last place he’d had it plugged in was the living space, he remembers.

He rolls out of bed, the tiles too cold against his bare feet. For some reason he’s trying to tread lightly even though he knows there’s no one to wake up - the floors are double insulated, soundproof - and once he’s properly awake he feels stupid for tiptoeing around his own home. It’s too early in the season for the radiant heating in the tile to be turned on. For a moment the blue light in the living room startles Ashton and he grabs the object nearest him - a broken umbrella hanging from the coat rack - and he holds it in front of him like a weapon.

“Why are you carrying that?” Michael asks, cocking his head curiously. “It’s not raining outside.”

Ashton leans it against the wall and tries to kick it behind the couch surreptitiously. “I, uh,” he stammers. The umbrella clatters to the floor noisily. “Nightmare,” he lies, unplugging his netportal charger from behind the entertainment center. He rarely moves the charger because it’s gotten tangled up with all the other cords in the console, but tonight he’s determined to hide from his own embarrassment no matter what it takes. It takes a series of trial and error before he finds it, feeling blindly behind the console for the right one.

Michael’s curled up comfortably on the couch, legs stretched out on the pleather upholstery illustrating exactly how long and lanky he is. It’s easy to forget sometimes, especially since he tries to make himself seem as small as possible. He’s got Ashton’s tablet in one hand, focused intently at something on the screen, and he’s got the thumb of his other hand clamped in between his teeth. For a minute Ashton stands in the dark watching him gnaw at the skin around his thumbnail, completely absorbed in whatever he’s doing. It’s a very naked moment. It might be the first moment that Ashton has truly understood the commitment he made when he signed his Partner contract, because here Michael is in a completely human moment, completely unaware that he’s being watched.

“Goodnight,” Ashton says before retreating to the bedroom with his netportal charger in hand. He doesn’t get a response in return; Michael’s too absorbed in whatever he’s looking at on the tablet to look up. It’s strange and probably bears some reflection, but Ashton’s too groggy still to do anything besides stagger back up to his room and plug the netportal charger into the outlet beside his bed. He scrolls through the humor sites for a while until he falls back asleep, the mystery of Michael and his tablet totally forgotten by the time sleep overtakes him.

 

Time passes in a vacuum the rest of the week. Ashton’s plagued by nightmares - he can never remember them upon waking, but he’s certain that they’re something terrible from the way his heart drums in his chest like it’s trying to leave his body. He does well at work, too spaced-out and anxious to bother with dicking around on his viewscreen between shipments in the mailroom. And still somehow his stats continue to climb despite him feeling like a zombie.

It’s not much better at home. By the time he gets home each night the lightpods are chasing him down the street, bumping clumsily into each other as they race to light the way for him. Friday comes sooner than he expected; he goes through the motions of stripping down and walking through the anti-bac chamber, eager to get into his street clothes and make his way through the rush hour commute so he can collapse on the couch and stare at the holoscreen for a few hours before passing out. The chamber doors swish open and on the other side someone’s saying his name.

“Irwin,” a man wearing a charcoal suit says smoothly. “A moment?”

And immediately a sharp tendril of panic curls around Ashton’s neck, snapping him back into reality. “Y-Yes,” he stammers, uncomfortably aware of his own nakedness and how far away his locker is. “Um, yes, I’ve got a moment. Sir.” The man extends his hand for a handshake and pumps Ashton’s arm, grip nearly painful. It makes Ashton feel small. The air in the commons is freezing, making the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand at attention.

“My name is Armstrong,” the man tells him, checking something on a small matte tablet briskly. “I’m from upper management.” Ashton can feel the moment his blood freezes in his veins. This is it - he’s going to get fired from his job, or something - and he stands stock-still, mouth gaping wide as Armstrong from upper management talks at him about his workday statistics using a bunch of terms he doesn’t quite understand. There’s a lot of the word ‘productivity’ being thrown around and at the end of the spiel, Armstrong grins at him and grips his forearm tight.

Then there’s a tablet and stylus being thrust into Ashton’s hands and, too dazed to process what’s happening, he signs in the box without reading over the document. He doesn’t want to know exactly how bad it is. “Um, thank you?” he says, huddling in on himself to keep warm.

“You’ll be a great addition to the team,” Armstrong tells him. Armstrong has a very shiny bald head and beady steel-grey eyes to complement his beak-like nose. He reminds Ashton very strongly of a bird of prey. “I look forward to seeing your progress over the next month. We’ll meet again in a month for your performance review,” he tells Ashton, striding away efficiently and disappearing into the elevatory bay before Ashton’s brain has had a chance to catch up to the conversation.

Calum, fully dressed, is waiting for him at their lockers. He gives Ashton a look of concern and goes, “What was all that about?”

“I think I just got offered a promotion,” Ashton says disbelievingly. He pulls on his clothes quickly, follows Calum out to the mag-train platform. “Are we still on for ‘Star Wars’ this weekend?” he asks. They join the huddle of people at the platform clustered together near the heaters, rubbing their hands together to keep warm.

“Yeah, of course. D’you mind if I bring Luke?”

Ashton has to pretend not to be disappointed by the question. “Of course you can bring him,” he says. He’s glad that the train glides up a moment later, cutting the conversation short as they shuffle their way through the throngs of people standing in the mag-train car to find a spot to hook their elbows through the drop-down plastic loops. Calum chatters on about Luke happily, oblivious to the fact that Ashton isn’t paying him any attention. Mostly Ashton’s watching the adverts on the glass - commercials for skin creams and teeth whiteners all in the name of perfection. He’s been thinking about it a lot in his more alert moments this week.

Not that there have been a lot of those - alert moments. He’s felt particularly buried underneath the boxes of mail to be delivered up to the offices, a seemingly endless stream of pneumo-tubes going in and out faster than ever before. Maybe it’s the added stress of having a Partner to provide for that’s doing his head in. Ashton barely notices Calum saying goodbye to him before his stop, almost misses his own stop in a daze of exhaustion and confusion. He’s looking forward to getting home to a hot meal and vegging out in front of the holoscreen with a beer or two before bed. His train of thought continues very much in the same vein on the walk home as lightpods trail sluggishly behind him, a few bumping his back as he walks. The air is cold enough to give him a chill - he’s starting to wish he’d worn a jacket.

Like clockwork, the front door swishes open to his thumbprint and Ashton staggers inside, dropping his bag in the front hallway and toeing out of his shoes. Something feels strange, though - his quarters don’t smell like slightly burnt food or the scent of fresh laundry. “Michael?” he calls into the dark living space uncertainly. Normally he’d get a response back from the kitchen or laundry room. Today, he gets nothing in response.

It snaps him out of his haze of exhaustion. He doesn’t - has something happened while he’s been at work? A cursory glance around the living quarters shows nothing out of place, but the lights are all off and the holoscreen projector feels cold to the touch. He checks the kitchen next. The burners on the stove are all cold, the sink full of dirty dishes left to soak the grease off in hot soapy water. It’s not like Michael to leave something unfinished. Worry creeps into Ashton’s veins as he checks his bedroom, wondering if Michael had gone to do something in there and gotten stuck in a feedback loop over something. He’s half-expecting to find his Partner standing over the dresser staring at a sock, or something, but the bedroom is as empty as the rest of his quarters had been.

The only place he hasn’t checked yet is the laundry room, but that seems like a strange place for Michael to be given the lateness of the hour. He had explained, earlier in the week, that it was best to do laundry early in the day to conserve energy. Something about time-of-use and other calculations Ashton hadn’t cared to pay attention to, but either way it’s strange to think that he would be in there at all. Ashton finds the laundry room door slightly ajar and the room itself dark. He swings the door open slowly expecting to find an empty room.

Instead, he’s greeted by the sight of Michael sitting atop the dryer, tablet in hand, completely immersed in whatever he’s doing. His long legs are hanging over the edge, one heel tapping against the side of the appliance as he jiggles his leg unknowingly. “Um, hi?” Ashton says, feeling like he’s intruded on something private.

“Oh,” Michael says, blinking hard as the overhead light flickers to life above him. “You’re home.” The skin around his thumb is red and swollen from being chewed on for an extended period of time - Ashton can see where he’s stripped away the first layer of skin, leaving raw and shiny new skin underneath. He wants to ask if it hurts - he feels a bizarre urge to press his mouth to the broken skin for a moment - but he knows that Michael can’t feel anything.

“Yeah,” Ashton says.

Michael shakes his head, disoriented. Ashton has to wonder how long he’s been in here to come home to the lights off and everything. “I’m - I lost track of time,” Michael says finally, looking from Ashton to the tablet with an almost guilty expression. His usually-pale cheeks are tinged with pink, voice high and strained like he’s expecting punishment to come from this. And again the urge to touch him is there, which Ashton has to quash almost immediately lest he do something very, very embarrassing that Michael will be unable to reciprocate.

“I’m not upset. Just - what were you doing in here with the lights off?” Ashton asks. He turns the light on in the kitchen, too, before retreating to his room to grab his netportal and charger. Michael trails behind him slowly. He’s trying with his body language to show that he’s not upset, purposely keeping his arms at his sides and not crossed over his chest. It seems to work - Michael relaxes after a few minutes once he’s seated at the counter island with his netportal - and he asks again, “Seriously, what have you been doing that’s got you losing track of time?” Part of him is rabidly curious, but more importantly he’s trying to determine whether or not Michael is defecting.

Almost immediately Michael’s body language closes off, withdrawing into himself defensively. It’s not in his nature to lie - according to the literature Partners can’t lie, but Ashton has never been sure he believes that - but it takes him a beat to answer, “I’ve been - uh…” and he’s obviously struggling to come up with an explanation that will please Ashton. He gets trapped in a feedback loop, stuttering helplessly and looking furious with himself for being unable to get the words out. Rather than wait for Michael to short himself out, Ashton decides to make things easy on both of them and picks up the tablet from where Michael had left it on the counter and taps the left corner of the touchscreen to bring it out of hibernate.

The ebook app is open, about halfway through ‘Catch-22’ judging by the progress bar at the bottom of the screen. “You’ve been reading?” Ashton asks incredulously. He thumbs over the home button and checks the other open apps, surprised - the web browser is open, the app store, Wikipedia - at what he finds. He goes back to the ebook app and scrolls through the ‘Recently Opened’ tab, scrolls through the titles in his cache. Ashton knows he’s certainly never read Atwood or Orwell, Steinbeck… They had barely covered the modern classics in his literature module, much less period literature from the 1900s. To say this is an unexpected turn of events is a bit of an understatement.

Michael flushes so hard that even the tips of his ears turn red. “You said,” he says softly. “You said I could do whatever I wanted to. Did you mean that?” The way his eyebrow quirks up is… defiant, almost, challenging Ashton to go back on his word over what had been a throwaway comment made in frustration.

Ashton bites his lip, struggling to hold back his reaction long enough to handle the situation calmly and rationally. “Yeah,” he answers. “Um. If you wanted to do other stuff I could make you a profile on here,” he says, indicating his netportal. While he’s thinking of it he opens the admin settings panel and adds a new profile to it, beckoning Michael over. He’ll need to set up thumbprint access for Michael. “I need your hand,” he says, reaching for it without thinking.

“I can’t do that,” Michael tells him.

He doesn’t realize until he’s got Michael’s hand in his. The skin is baby-soft - and then he turns Michael’s hand over in his and realizes that his fingerprints have been worn down. He should’ve known, of course, that that would be the case. Still, it’s jarring and makes him irrationally angry in his core knowing that he’s bought into a system that literally strips people of their right to an identity. “Right,” Ashton sighs. “That’s okay, I’ll just…” and a few minutes - and a lot of angry keyboard smashing - later he’s managed to bypass his netportal’s security settings to disable to thumbprint access entirely.

Behind him, Michael hovers uncertainly. “I don’t think you’re supposed to do that,” he whispers. Ashton sets the access for all programs to public, figuring that in lieu of thumbprint access it will have to do. He wishes Calum were around to make sure he hasn’t totally broken his netportal - he’s the one who’s good at techie stuff.

“There,” Ashton says, proud of himself for managing to make it work. “You should be able to access most stuff under my profile, but if there’s anything it won’t let you do just let me know and I’ll find a workaround, I guess.” If they’re going to break the rules, he might as well do it right. Michael looks like he might cry. He’s having some kind of thing, anyway, and maybe it’s some emotion that BLITS didn’t manage to completely repress or maybe Ashton has managed to break his Partner.

The only thing Michael says to him for the rest of the night is, “Pizza for dinner?” and once Ashton nods mutely in response, he retreats to the laundry room and shuts the door, effectively barricading himself from Ashton for the rest of the night. When the pizza arrives Michael comes out of the laundry room to grab two slices of the Hawaiian, leaving the meat lovers’ untouched and leaving Ashton to wonder if he’s starting to develop preferences on his own. Ashton finds himself folding his pizza in half lengthwise even without Michael in the room, eating the rest of his meat lovers’ pizza by himself in front of the holoscreen.

He’s not sure, actually, whether Partners are supposed to develop habits like this on their own. It’s not something he should discuss with Calum who, for all his talk about ‘fuck the system’ and ‘I don’t want a stupid Partner, I want to fall in love’ when they were younger, has become a creature of comfortable habits. Ashton doesn’t want to believe that Calum would turn him in - turn them in, he thinks, reminding himself that Michael is as much a part of this as he is - but on the other hand, Calum likes things the way they are. Sometime later that night Ashton drags his netportal off to bed with him and only after the bedroom door is shut, the lights turned out, does he feel comfortable enough to open his web browser.

It’s probably a dumb question. He opens the search engine and types, ‘Is my Partner normal?’ into the search bar. Over a million hits pop up, most of them about symptoms of a defecting Partner. The first page of results is sponsored by BLITS; Ashton grumbles at these and clicks through to the second page, which is even less helpful. He tries variations of the same search with different wording without any luck.

Frustrated, he logs into his e-net and quietly deletes the forwarded emails full of cat .gifs that his mum insists on sending to him. No matter how many times Ashton tells her “Mum, they proved years ago that you can’t actually die from not forwarding them to ten friends in fifty seconds,” she refuses to listen, filling his inbox with glittery space cats. Once he’s cleaned up the excess .gifs there are a few promotional offers from the requisition depot that are expired, a public health reminder about influenza vaccinations, and a message from an unknown sender. Ashton almost deletes it. He intends to delete it, hovering over the link to see whether it’s an advert for natural male enhancement or hair plugs.

What he finds is another thing entirely. When he hovers over it, a list of attachments pop up, all with the file extension .pdev. Ashton recognizes that extension from his Year 11 simulation module; it’s the file format for Partner sims that get submitted to BLITS for evaluation. So what are they doing in his inbox? Unable to stave off his curiosity, he opens the message and checks the net address of the sender. The address field helpfully informs him that the sender is ‘r.dawson’ from BLITS:Dev. He vaguely remembers Dawson promising to send him something through the e-net, but he hadn’t taken it seriously. Usually his communications from BLITS labs come through a ‘do not reply’ channel. It’s a little strange, to be certain, but Ashton feels like’s missing some piece of the puzzle. He drops the files into his encrypted folder with the rest of Michael’s development notes.

It’s late and he’s never been great at interpreting the development notes, anyway, so he can deal with them another time. He’s never actually looked at them, anyway - what would they be able to tell him that he couldn’t learn on his own? Between this and his unhelpful searches to determine if there’s something wrong with Michael, he’s exhausted. Sleep comes quickly and Ashton falls into a deep, dreamless sleep without thinking any more about it.

 

On Saturday they go to the requisition depot. It’s the first time Ashton has had Michael out of the house since their activation date - and he has a weird feeling about thinking about it being theirs, about the word ‘date’ - but he brushes that aside when he wakes early to shower. He does think about it in the shower, scrubbing shampoo through his hair and hating his curls in the way he does. The thing is, he’s relieved that Michael is doing things without him. He’s relieved that at least Michael’s not sitting at home while he’s at work staring at the walls and waiting for him to return. The weather app on his netportal tells him that it’s going to be damp and chilly today; Ashton layers on a hoodie and jacket over his long-sleeved thermal.

Michael’s burning the bacon when he makes it to the kitchen, automatically going for his coffee mug on the counter. “You’re burning it,” Ashton says, draining half the liquid in his mug with one sip. He wolfs down breakfast, shoveling scrambled eggs doused in hot sauce into his mouth methodically while he watches the morning news feeds. Ashton has never particularly been a morning person. This morning is an exception because he’s eager to get out and do something other than go to the office tower and sort fucking endless pneumo-tubes, especially now… Oh. “I forgot to tell you,” he says around a mouthful of burnt bacon. It’s good, really, he’d forgotten how much he liked the taste of it burnt. “I might be up for a promotion at work.”

“Is that good?” Michael wants to know.

“Probably,” Ashton tells him. “At least, I must be doing something right if they’re saying I’m management material.” The thought makes his skin crawl with nerves, so he says nothing more about it. Once the breakfast dishes are washed and put away - Ashton’s been pretty firm about doing his part, even though he knows he doesn’t have to - he makes sure Michael’s got his shoes on before they’re out the door. The morning sunlight does nothing to warm him as they walk down to the mag-train platform.

This early in the morning the platform is all but deserted, lightpods resting snugly on their bollards. It doesn’t take long for the train to arrive; Ashton takes the lead as they step into the train car, making sure to double-tap his thumb for the correct train fares. They take the southbound line into the city center. Michael seems a bit overwhelmed by all the bustle of the central transit hub. “There are a lot of people here,” he comments. Ashton fights the urge to shush him - he doesn’t want to draw undue attention to them - but in the end he nods in agreement and pulls Michael along through the crowd, holding his elbow loosely.

“If you think this crowd is bad, just wait until we get to the req depot,” Ashton mutters grimly. There’s a reason he only goes to the requisition depot once a month to stock up on necessities. The push-carts are all gone from the front, meaning they have to weave their way through the banks of parked hover-cars to find an abandoned one in the lot. As soon as they’re in possession of a push-cart, Ashton leads Michael through the tall front doors of the requisition depot and into the clutches of bulk value-priced hell.

The aisles are packed closely together, piled floor-to-ceiling with everything imaginable. It’s a spectator sport, Saturday mornings at the requisition depot. Between the coupon queens with their palm tabs scanning the QR codes of every item on the sales floor to see if they can get a discount and the hordes of suburban mums in their pajama pants power-walking through the aisles in packs, it’s a veritable zoo. For the most part Michael is content to stay near the push-cart, silent while Ashton goes through his mental shopping list. He’s suddenly glad for Michael’s height when they get to the paper products aisle; usually he has to stand on his tip-toes or scale one of the shelves to get a pack of toilet paper down but Michael just reaches up and grabs it like it’s no big deal. And he does it without being asked, too, which is very thoughtful. And makes Ashton incredibly nervous - he glances over his shoulder at the people around them, scanning for a black armband or someone clad in all black.

They round a corner into the next aisle and Michael takes a step closer to him, asks under his breath, “What’s wrong?” He nods slightly at Ashton’s whitening knuckles on the handle of the push-cart and for a split second the corners of his mouth turn down into a frown.

“Wait for me to ask you to do things,” Ashton says through his gritted teeth. He slips his hand through the crook of Michael’s elbow and holds on, rushing through the rest of the aisles. They don’t need very much from the requisition depot, anyway - he fills the cart with family pack boxes of bran cereal, refill cartridges for the beverage synthesizer and bulk packs of thick winter socks. At the self-checkout he shows Michael how to locate the QR code for each item and point it at the scanner before bagging everything. The requisition depot still uses thick paper bags at the checkout lanes, stiff and sturdy and multi-purpose. Once it’s all done, he waves his wrist under the scanner and waits for the short ping that confirms his purchase.

In line for the hover-cars, he looks at all the people around them. Suddenly it seems more important than ever that they fit in, fit the profile of a normal couple doing the shopping. He can’t think of a way to communicate to Michael that he needs to stop fidgeting and shifting the bag he’s holding from hip to hip. When the constant line of hover-cars taking on passengers finally gets to them, the driver hops out and packs the boot of the car efficiently before pulling his palm tab out and waiting for Ashton to give him coordinates. Ashton mumbles them, pausing briefly to make sure they’re keyed in correctly, and slides into the backseat of the hover before beckoning Michael to do the same. Through the whole ride he feels tense and overexposed, like his every action is on display and being scored for accuracy. When they land the hover-car in front of their unit he’s never been more relieved to tap his thumb against the identi-glass screen and watch the credits be withdrawn from his account. Michael, to his credit, unpacks the boot of the car and carries everything up the steps while Ashton takes care of the payment.

Ashton presses his thumb to the lock and waits for the door to spring open before stooping to grab one of the bags and carry it inside. “I can do it,” Michael says, sounding a little peevish. “I can bring everything in, you don’t have to,” he repeats, clearly stuck in a feedback loop. While he works on getting himself unstuck, Ashton brings the groceries into the kitchen to put away. By the time Michael stalks into the kitchen with the last of the bags he’s clearly annoyed, goes “I could have done it,” and slams the cupboard doors more than necessary as he puts things in their place.

“Calm down,” Ashton tells him. Without thinking he places a hand on Michael’s arm, surprised at how tense the muscles feel beneath his skin.

He’s surprised when Michael brushes him off, too, storms off to the laundry room and slams the door closed. Instinct pushes him to follow, to try and provoke a reaction or something, but instead he clamps down on his feelings and reminds himself that it’s not fair of him to do that. It’s not fair to do that to someone who can’t really fight back. Or can Michael? Can he, when he’s reading books and political satire and now he’s storming off in a sulk just like a teenager? In the middle of the night Ashton had read the wiki article on ‘Catch-22’, checked his recent check-outs at the e-library. The stuff Michael’s been reading isn’t just mass-produced fluff. He’s been reading stuff that toes a very dangerous line, stuff from the banned books list in their literature modules at school, stuff most people would never even dream existed. And there’s nothing Ashton can say about it anyway, not without revoking his promise that he wouldn’t be upset no matter what Michael did.

Instead he has to question his own reactions to it, wonder why it makes him so drastically uncomfortable. The only conclusion he can come to is that everything - his purchase history at the requisition depot, his e-library history, even his search history - is put under a microscope constantly, and any deviant behavior gets squashed out by any means necessary. He doesn’t want to send Michael in for recalibration. In his gut he knows that’s what he’s supposed to do; he knows that they’re breaking laws by the mere fact of Michael’s existence, but he doesn’t want to do the right thing. It’s incredibly selfish. It’s incredibly reckless. And yet here he is, with his fingers poised over his netportal on the BLITS page hovering over the ‘Report’ button. If he self-reports then he won’t suffer from any negative consequences. The Handlers will show up, take Michael away for a few weeks, and then he’ll be returned to Ashton shiny and new again.

Ashton gives it an hour before he pokes his head into the laundry room to check on Michael. “Are you finished sulking?” he asks. For a moment he thinks Michael’s purposely ignoring him, until he notices the knee bouncing up and down aimlessly and then it clicks in his mind that Michael can’t hear him at all. He crosses the small space to where the makeshift nest of pillows and blankets are laid out beside the washing machine. The spare linens have been disappearing from the closet little by little; it doesn’t really bother Ashton much since he’s not using them, anyway, and he’d rather they be put to good use. Gently he pulls one of the earpods out of Michael’s ear and goes, “What are you listening to in here, anyway?”

“Nirvana,” Michael says guiltily. A slight redness creeps along his cheekbones, the tips of his ears, the back of his neck. It’s not unattractive, but Ashton pretends he doesn’t notice because that is a complicated set of feelings he’s not ready to deal with yet. He’s just hoping that Michael doesn’t notice his physical reaction to being in the small space, this enforced closeness. The small physical tics are supposed to foster positive feelings toward each other - basically, to fool Ashton into feeling like he’s in love. Despite him knowing this, he feels the hollow in his chest when his heart stutters and knocks around in his ribcage stupidly.

He backs away abruptly, smashing his calf on the edge of the washing machine. It smarts and he hisses, “Motherfucker,” at the machine. And he knows it’s going to leave a bruise, ugly and mottled and uncomplicated, and that’s maybe comforting in a morbid sense. When he checks his e-library account later in the evening - dinner is a sullen affair punctuated by Michael shuffling around the kitchen noisily banging pots and pans around - ‘Brave New World’ is the newest addition. Ashton knows that book. Studied it in his literature module during the unit on banned books; the thing that worries him is that Michael’s checked out the unabridged version. It’s not surprising. The knowledge still sits in his chest like a lead balloon weighting him to the mattress as he tosses and turns all night long, in and out of restless dreams of faceless men dressed all in black and zipcuffs.

When he wakes in the very early hours of the morning it’s with the word ‘No’ still on his lips. The light outside is weak and greying; he drags himself out of bed to the bathroom for a piss and splashes cold water on his face, the back of his neck. Rather than trudging back to his bedroom he pauses outside the door to the laundry room, still closed after his non-argument with Michael earlier. He hovers outside it thinking of knocking on the door and asking to come in. In the end he chickens out and goes back to his bed. He lies there trying to fall asleep unsuccessfully for over an hour before the nagging idea of the laundry room beckons him and, once again, he gets up. He goes to the laundry room again, this time trailing the duvet after him wrapped around his shoulders to fight off the lingering chill from overnight. It feels stupid knocking on the door, but he does it anyway half-expecting to be turned away.

Instead, Michael goes, “It’s not locked,” and Ashton thinks that he hadn’t known the laundry room locked at all. It seems a bit foreboding; he hasn’t really changed anything around his quarters too much, having lived here less than a year still, but the idea that the previous owner had needed to lock the laundry machines away unsettles him. Or were they locking something else away? he wonders. The sinister thoughts swirl around in his mind and it’s that that propels him to open the door, seeking something like companionship to chase away the persistence of his nightmare. Although he does have to wonder if it’s considered a nightmare anymore if it continues long after his waking. But the nagging thoughts are quickly pushed aside once his eyes adjust to the light inside the small, dim room - the laundry room being the only room besides his pantry that doesn’t have auto-illuminate lights in the ceiling that detect motion and body heat. To compensate for that, Michael’s stolen three of the touch-lights from the pantry and stuck them up on the wall adjacent to the dryer. He’s also managed to stockpile the majority of Ashton’s linen closet in a corner, spare pillows propped up against the wall to create a soft cushiony nest to lie in and the extra blankets wrapped around him.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Ashton says. He looks at the nest of blankets - and he does have to admit that it looks very appealing - and asks, “Can I sit?”

Michael lifts up the edge of the topmost blanket for him until he’s settled in on the floor. He goes, “You were talking in your sleep,” and the inner part of his eyebrows swoop downward in an expression of concern and confusion. There’s a blue glow cast on his face; Ashton realizes that he’s got something rigged up using some old magnets from the kitchen drawers to mount the tablet onto the side of the dryer. “I’m watching a whale documentary,” he says, flexing his fingers in a familiar gesture.

“Is that my old holo-glove? I thought we threw that away,” Ashton muses. And Michael pauses the whale documentary so he can get comfortable in the little blanket nest. “Why whales, though?” Ashton asks once he’s gotten comfortable.

“Why not?”

Ashton shrugs. “Never really thought about them,” he admits. “I had a bad dream,” he adds.

And because Michael doesn’t sleep he has no concept of dreams, of how nightmares can often seem even more real and visceral after they’re over, he mimics Ashton’s shrug and goes, “Okay.” He flexes his fingers and starts the documentary feed back up, leaning back into the pillows and watching the small screen with interest. The narrator has one of those resonant, soothing voices that seems to make the edges of everything smooth and blurred. “Dreams aren’t real, you know,” Michael tells him some time later. “So you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”

“They’re still frightening,” Ashton replies.

Underneath the blanket Michael’s hand brushes against the back of his own deliberately. Ashton accepts this small comfort and maybe - just maybe - he shifts a little bit closer to his Partner as they watch the documentary together. He doesn’t actually care about whales; the narrator’s voice is making him sleepy again but he doesn’t want to get up and go back to his room. His bed seems suddenly unappealing, and besides getting up and the cold air hitting his legs would probably wake him right back up. Between the heat trapped in by the blankets and Michael’s body warmth he could probably fall asleep right where he is. As the documentary drags on and he’s sure that Michael is totally absorbed in watching it, he scoots himself a little closer and cuddles into Michael’s side a bit. It feels stupid; it feels right and he has to grit his teeth and remind himself that it’s not real.

He notices it when Michael’s arm slides low around his waist to pull him closer. And he lets himself be pulled, fairly certain that he’s supposed to be the one in charge of the situation, but his limbs are heavy with sleep and he feels warm and agreeable and he lets it happen. “Go to sleep,” Michael tells him - and it’s not quite a command, but something close to one - and so he lays his head on Michael’s shoulder. “No more bad dreams,” Michael adds sternly.

“Right,” he agrees, slipping one of his feet between Michael’s outstretched ankles. Finally he feels safe enough, sleepy enough, to actually get some rest. When he wakes up properly later in the morning - and Michael’s gone and let him sleep most of it away without work to tether him to something resembling a schedule - it takes a moment to remember where he is. His legs ache in protest of the cramped way he’s held them in his sleep. He’s got them shoved under Michael’s drawn up knees, one arm slung over his Partner’s waist companionably. It feels like something that’s happened a thousand times before. Ashton wakes up in stages, first wriggling his toes in their socks and then his fingers against the starchy cotton of Michael’s shirt. “What are you doing,” he asks blearily, lifting his head slightly to see the tablet screen perched on Michael’s knees precariously. It takes longer than it should to realize he’s been asleep with his head on Michael’s chest, which in turn necessitated the awkward sleeping position.

Michael ignores his question, or maybe doesn’t understand the mumbled words against his shirt. “Good morning,” he says brightly.

It’s shitty and selfish of Ashton to think that the apparent upswing in Michael’s mood has anything to do with him. He only realizes how good his Partner smells when he lifts his head just slightly enough that his words can be understood and it irks him that he even notices. “What’re you doing,” he yawns, unintentionally shifting even closer with the stretch that accompanies his jaw-cracking yawn.

“Did you know that before the Crash we used to have a mammal that could lay eggs? Look,” Michael says, tapping the screen impatiently to enlarge a photo. It looks like someone chopped up a bunch of different animals and put them together like a mammalian Frankenstein’s monster - it’s got a stout little body covered in thick-looking brown fur and a long, flat tail like the New American musk-beaver, but with webbed feet like a duck’s and the beak of one too. “Apparently they were poisonous too, look,” he continues, zooming in and rotating the 3D image so Ashton can see its feet, which feature sharp claws at the end of each webbed toe and an even sharper spur at the heel.

“That’s terrifying,” Ashton grumbles, pushing his face back into Michael’s chest without thinking. “I’m glad they’re extinct.” Michael’s chest rumbles and he sits up abruptly, confused and alarmed by the sudden vibration and grumpily he goes, “What?” A few seconds pass before he realizes that Michael is laughing at him.

Michael fails to suppress the smile that creeps its way in, spreading across his face like the sunlight on a hot summer day. And it feels like sunshine; he says, “You’ve never given much thought to whales, which actually exist right here on the coast, but you’re afraid of a little platypus. That makes sense.” All Ashton can think is that sarcasm looks good on him. It’s a jarring thought but not an unwelcome one. He slumps lower against his Partner’s chest for a moment, can feel the blush spreading across his cheeks and down his neck, along his chest. Michael’s arms close around him and then he’s laughing, too, short of breath but not… It’s that kind of breathless laughter that punches the air straight out of his lungs. It has nothing to do with their proximity.

The worst part about all of this is that Ashton feels exactly how he’s supposed to feel, and he knows it, and it’s that which proves that he’s failing. Because it would be one thing if it were a natural progression; he’s painfully aware of it, of his reactions to Michael and finds himself more and more having to pull himself away. He doesn’t want to be a slave to his own biology. And it’s something he now realizes that BLITS uses to keep people in line, to keep them complacent and following along with their plan for the future. He knows that there’s a vague, shadowy government organization somewhere that owns BLITS Labs and all its subsidiaries, that decides how things are going to be run and everything down to the brands of cereal available to buy. Ashton’s never put that much thought into it.

He’s not opposed to the Partner program out of any sort of political agenda. If he were, he thinks he never would have been approved for one at all. So in a way he’s safer than the conscientious objectors, condemned to minimum-credit jobs in the heavy labor sector to tire them out too much for anything other than collapsing into their beds, exhausted, at the end of the day. It’s more that he wants to determine his own fate, even if it’s something as small as who he’s attracted to. But he’s still outraged; he’s still angry, and the part that hurts him the most is that he genuinely likes Michael most of the time.

 

In the afternoon they take the mag-train over to the greenlawn theater. Michael does much better his second time on the train; it’s busy with people on their way home from the central travel hub returning from visiting friends or family so he has to loop his arm through one of the hand-holds. He stays close to Ashton’s side and grips his elbow loosely, only stumbling forward as the train stops a few times. They meet Calum and Luke halfway there. Calum’s still grinning from ear to ear as he leads Luke through the crowded mag-train car, managing to claim a seat once an older man in corduroys and a blazer stands. Ashton tries not to be irked about it; if it were him he would’ve made Michael sit since he’s much more accustomed to the subtle movements of the mag-train as it moves across the city. Luke’s uncoordinated. He’s clumsy, knocking knees and elbows into the people around them oblivious to their annoyed stares and less-than-subtle comments murmured across the car to their travel companions.

Without thinking too much about it Ashton reaches back and grabs for Michael’s hand. It’s a little sweaty and clammy. It’s hot in the crowdedness of the train, though, and so Ashton files that thought away as nothing to worry about. They don’t talk on the way to the greenlawn, much. He has enough trouble hearing the station announcements over the low, rumbling din of voices. The crowd thins a bit once they step out into the evening air. “So this is Luke,” Calum tells them as they walk. “How are you guys doing?” He asks the question to Ashton, like Michael’s not even there, and beside him Ashton can feel Michael bristling a bit.

“It’s been a bit of a weird adjustment, to be honest,” Ashton admits.

Michael falls into step with him easily, hands still linked together between them. Now that they’re out in the world surrounded by other people Ashton’s heart feels like it’s jackhammering its way out of his chest; he can see now how obvious it is that Michael’s defecting. While Calum chatters away about all the things he and Luke have been doing, Luke’s walking beside him quietly with his eyes cast straight ahead in wide-eyed indifference. He has to nudge Michael with his elbow several times - but gently, and always as they’re turning a corner or blocked from view since there are handlers lurking around - to remind him that he’s not actually allowed to chime in whenever he likes as long as they’re in public. By the time they’ve passed all of the greenhouses both of their hands are clammy and sweaty again.

There are two showings in the amphitheater tonight: the interactive screening of the second ‘Star Wars’ film and for the newly-activated Partners they’re showing ‘The Little Mermaid’ in the adjacent theater. “Stay with Luke once you get inside,” Ashton tells Michael. He tries to make it clear what he’s saying with his facial expression, but Michael doesn’t seem to get it. They hang back a bit from the crowd of people ushering their Partners inside; Ashton watches their interactions closely to find a way to let Michael know that they’re being watched. The handlers on either side of the double doors are making him nervous. Enough of the other people hug their Partners or draw close before parting that Ashton feels relatively comfortable enough with pulling Michael into a hug in front of the doors. “Hug me back,” he hisses when Michael’s arms hang limply at his sides. “We’re being watched. Just copy everyone else and stay here when the film ends. I’ll come find you,” he promises.

Michael nods - tiny, imperceptibly, but enough that Ashton can feel the movement - and follows after Luke into the darkened theater. They go into the interactive theater and claim seats in the middle; all the top row seats have been taken already by those smart enough to arrive early. “You want anything?” Calum asks, tapping at the order screen for the concession stand idly. He buys them both snacks and kicks his feet up on the back of the seats in front of them, only half-watching the adverts flickering around as the holo technicians calibrate the projector. “Michael’s cute,” he comments.

“Yeah,” Ashton echoes. “He’s alright.” And Calum raises an eyebrow but doesn’t press the issue any further. They chatter about work; Ashton doesn’t mention the promotion, doesn’t mention the suffocating feeling of handlers all around them and even at work feeling watched and caged-in by men in suits observing him.

The film starts with the main characters on the ice planet Hoth. It’s not a great film, to be honest - the plot is flimsy and Han Solo, the protagonist, is ofter overshadowed by his Partner and her headstrong advances - and he finds himself bored of it quickly. Most of the crowd gasps in horror when Han is encased in the carbonite meant to imprison his Partner, Leia. The strong emotional response means that most of the audience doesn’t notice the way the film skips and pixelates during that scene. It’s obviously footage that has been spliced. Ashton knows that the SOFE censors old-world media to edit out some of the more problematic ideas that led up to the Crash, but the way they’ve re-mastered the ‘Star Wars’ movies in particular makes them seem unappealing and tired. He would rather like to get a copy of the original footage. There’s no way he could, though, since he doesn’t have the right permissions for the archives and he doesn’t know anyone who does. Vaguely he wonders if he could hack into the archives - he’s not great at programming, so he’d probably get caught.

He thinks about it long enough that he doesn’t notice the film ending until Calum nudges him. “Ash, come on,” he says, tugging at Ashton’s shoulder ineffectively. Ashton follows behind him, blinking hard against the bright lights in the amphitheater lobby. Like he’d requested, Michael and Luke wait for them inside the theater. Luke immediately goes to Calum; Michael hangs back looking irritable. His expression is tightly controlled and blank, but Ashton can tell from his eyes that he’s annoyed and wants to go home. Unfortunately he’d promised Calum that they would go for dinner afterward, so he’s going to have to disappoint his Partner. Which nags at him a bit more than he’d like to admit, but he tries not to let it show.

Michael squeezes his hand when they link their fingers together on the walk past the greenhouses to the mag-train platform. Once they’re on the train he huddles close to Ashton and mutters, “That movie was awful. Why couldn’t I go with you?” His chin presses sharply into Ashton’s shoulder, illustrating his disdain for the Disney film entirely too well.

“Explain later,” Ashton answers under his breath. There’s a handler sitting across from them but he’s staring at the window adverts; Ashton knows better than to chance his luck, digs his nails into his Partner’s palm. The handler gets off a few stops later near the arts district. They both breathe a sigh of relief and Michael’s tense body language relaxes visibly. At the downtown transit hub they get off the train to walk a few blocks to the restaurant Calum had wanted to try. Michael gets quickly annoyed by the swarm of lightpods that chase after them, swatting them away until Ashton clears his throat loudly and digs his nails into Michael’s palm again. It’s busy at the restaurant, too, and this time it’s Ashton who gets annoyed by their Partners getting ushered away into a different room to watch more old-world children’s feeds while they enjoy an over-priced meal with seriously under-sized portions.

He’s beginning to notice a trend emerging. Before their activation date, Calum had been intensely frugal with his credits and now everywhere they go he’s spending recklessly on expensive things. It’s not just a Calum thing, though, Ashton thinks - looking at the people around them in the restaurant, the other tables are mostly occupied by people around their same age, nicely dressed with designer handbags and wristwatches. And it would be a safe bet to assume that many of the people dining are willing to pay a few extra credits for the discretion of the waitstaff so they can bring their side pieces on a date without being reported on or scrutinized. Honestly, he would prefer being at home and ordering a pizza than paying for a fist-sized portion of filet mignon and what amounts to fancy baked potatoes with a garnish. The company, he decides, would be infinitely better.

Ashton finds that he is actually starting to like just sitting in the main room with Michael, whether they’re watching the holo feeds together or Michael is messing with some discarded electronics he’s found lying around the house. “How many of these people do you think are here on dates?” he asks Calum, keeping his voice low and conspiratorial. He doesn’t want to be overheard, but the thought is chipping away at his resolve. Do people think that they’re here on a date? he wonders. The rest of the dinner is strained and tense; Ashton finds himself watching the people around the more than he’s engaging with Calum, glancing over his shoulder whenever he can to check on Michael and Luke in the other room. He catches a glimpse of Michael sitting listlessly in the corner, watching as Luke and a few others put together a puzzle. In the end he’s barely picked at his food by the time the server comes by with the scanner to collect their payment.

Guilt knots in his stomach at the number on the credit reader. “I’ve got it,” Calum says, seemingly not caring that Ashton had barely touched his meal. He holds his wrist out for the server and doesn’t even blink twice at the cost of it. The scanner pings, confirming that his payment has been accepted. Drunk on good spirits and the generally accepted amount of preening that pervades society after an activation date, Calum keeps up his level of chatter all the way back to the mag-train platform. Ashton’s relieved not to have to fill in the conversational lulls; all he has to do is nod and go ‘Uh-huh’ every once in a while and Calum seems happy enough. And maybe it’s shitty friendship of him to feel the way he feels, but he kind of feels like he’s been robbed of his best friend and a shiny, glowing android put in his place and he’s expected not to notice. They swipe their wrists over the scanner out of habit and Ashton spends the majority of the train ride home huddled against Michael, staring blankly at the adverts playing in the windows.

Once Calum and Luke have gotten off the train, Michael turns to him and says, “Let’s not do that again.”

“Agreed,” Ashton sighs, running one hand through his unruly hair. He notices the goosebumps raised on Michael’s arms on the walk home from the platform, wonders if that’s normal for this time of year. But it’s cold even to him, so undoubtedly even if his Partner doesn’t feel it there’s a certain kind of chill in the air that burrows straight to the bone. Or maybe that’s his paranoia talking. “Stop damaging government property,” he says when Michael swats at the lightpods again, trying and failing to suppress his laughter. It’s probably mean to laugh at his Partner’s distress.

Michael scowls and bats one of the hovering lights away, only to be assailed by another one zooming in to take its’ brother’s place. “It’s not funny!” he grumbles. “Why would anyone invent these?” The cluster of pods thins out once they’re out of range of the mag-train platform; Ashton grabs Michael by the hand - out of propriety, he tells himself, it’s what he’s supposed to be doing - and they walk together back to their quarters holding hands, Michael making a huffy noise every time a lightpod crashes into the backs of his thighs.

When they’re standing on the doorstep, Ashton pauses before unlocking the door. “Thank you for tonight,” he says, suddenly feeling an uncharacteristic mixture of anxiety and… nervousness, maybe? “Calum’s not usually like that. I don’t… I don’t know what was up with him. But you were really good. So, um, thanks,” he finishes lamely, squeezing Michael’s forearm before opening the front door to let them both inside. He goes to bed soon afterward. Though he’s plagued by more anxiety-induced nightmares, he doesn’t mention it the next morning and things continue on very much as they had been before. It feels like something’s changed between them, though.

 

Things keep going missing from their usual places. It’s driving Ashton slightly batty; he’s been more frazzled than usual between working odd hours at the behest of Armstrong, who’s pushing him more and more with the promise of a promotion the carrot unofficially dangling in front of his nose, and on top of that the growing sense of unease he’s been feeling about his and Calum’s friendship. He has his hand in the drawer where he keeps spare parts for his netportal - in particular, he’s looking for a replacement mag-head for the charging cord and can’t find one - and no matter how much he rummages around he can’t find another. The current head had crapped out on him overnight and he hadn’t had time to fix it before work in the morning. If he’d had time he would have mentioned it to Michael, who would undoubtedly have fixed it for him, but since his netportal battery had died without the charger head working properly he slept through his scheduled alarms and ended up late for work.

He would mention it to Michael now, only Michael has been on a peculiar spree this past week of experimental cooking to varying degrees of edibleness. “Hey,” he calls from the main living quarters, trying to keep the frustration from seeping into his voice. “Do you know where my spare charger heads are?”

And he knows that shouting between rooms isn’t technically forbidden, but it is definitely frowned upon. From the kitchen he hears a crash, followed by the sound of breaking glass, and by the time he’s rounded the corner Michael is standing in the middle of the tiled floor staring at a broken drinking glass smashed to bits. Suddenly Ashton thinks he understands, about the shouting thing. “I’m sorry,” Michael says. His voice is flat and deadened, features carefully blank. “I’ll clean it up,” he says, already shouldering past Ashton to get the push vacuum from the cupboard.

“Stop,” Ashton says, looking at the broken glass and Michael’s bare feet.

Michael does, and stands at the edge of the kitchen staring at him. Only once he’s stopped moving does Ashton realize his hand is bleeding, that there’s probably broken glass embedded in the flesh, and even if Michael doesn’t feel it there’s still a very real risk of infection if the wound isn’t properly looked after. “I can clean it up,” Michael repeats. His conditioned response to the mess is to clean it up, of course, and he’s clearly struggling with the conflicting urge to do as Ashton says. There are spots of blood on his t-shirt, crimson red against the bleached-white fabric. The shirt is ruined. The shirt is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things; there will always be a requisition form to fill out and request a new one, but it’s not even about the goddamn shirt at this point.

Like he does every other time Michael gets stuck in a feedback loop, Ashton sighs and rubs his hands through his hair irritably. “Come on,” he says, leading Michael by the elbow to the bathroom. He’s never had much use for the first aid kit under the sink before but he’s certainly glad for it now. The latch is easy to undo and then the thin, durable metal case springs open, giving Ashton an impressive array of items to choose from. He takes an alcohol wipe from the kit and tears the wrapper open, leaving it on the edge of the sink to be taken care of later. “Give me your hand,” he tells Michael. Even though he knows that nothing he can do will hurt Michael he still tries to be careful, particularly around the area where the glass has embedded in his palm. And he has no idea how that could’ve happened, doesn’t know for sure if he wants to know. After the blood has been wiped away he takes the tweezers included in the first aid kit and stares at the shard of glass, trying to assess the best way to remove it.

In the end he decides to say fuck it and just pull it straight out. He hasn’t much experience with this kind of thing. It takes a fair amount of wiggling and pulling to get the shard out; he doesn’t like to see the blood but he stomachs it anyway. “Ow,” Michael hisses, jerking his hand away suddenly just as Ashton is about to be finished removing the glass from his hand.

Which is wrong. Michael’s not supposed to feel pain. “What,” Ashton says, pulling the tweezers back.

“That hurt,” Michael tells him, frowning at his palm like it’s betrayed him. And when he’d pulled his hand away he’d wrapped the hem of his t-shirt around it, smearing even more blood on the already ruined fabric. It’s not that he’s bleeding a lot, even. It’s just more shocking to see something so staunchly white and pristine marred by a stain like that. After a moment has passed he extends his palm to Ashton again, mumbles, “Sorry,” and hangs his head like he’s expecting to be punished. And maybe he is. The thought hurts to think, but there it is.

The rest of it is easy. Ashton cleans the wound with some hydrogen peroxide from a small brown bottle he finds in the kit and then wraps it in gauze in case it bleeds any more. “Stay out of the kitchen until I get this cleaned up, okay?”

“I can clean it up,” Michael argues, this time combative and frustrated instead of sounding robotic and hollow. He’s developed a habit of furrowing his eyebrows when he’s frustrated, which is going to create problems for both of them if it continues because he’s going to start getting frown lines. Ashton ignores his protests. It only takes a minute to sweep up the broken glass in the kitchen, and he only needs a minute to get a grip on his panic anyway. In all the chaos they’ve both forgotten about the food still cooking on the stovetop, now burned beyond all recognition. Hopefully, Ashton prods it with a spatula, but it’s past the point of being saved. He pushes the lump of charred food around the frying pan forlornly for a minute before he pitches it into the waste disposal unit.

Michael stares at him grumpily from across the countertop, still wearing his bloodstained t-shirt. The thought nags at Ashton until he’s done cleaning up the kitchen. “Hey, order a pizza or something. I’ll be right back,” he says. He goes into the bedroom and digs through his drawers until he finds what he’s looking for and pulls the shirt out from the back of one triumphantly. It’s nothing special; it’s one of his old t-shirts from the fitness module they’d had to endure each year in school, the fabric worn thin and stretched out from being washed over and over. More importantly, though, it’s stretched out enough that it will probably fit Michael. Ashton returns to the kitchen and tosses the shirt at Michael, goes, “Put this on,” and quickly moves to the main living quarters before he can change his mind.

It’s not breaking any rules. Technically. It’s not stated anywhere that his Partner can’t wear something other than the regulation clothing that BLITS issues, he reminds himself. He’s seen dozens of people in the downtown sector who have entire wardrobes custom-made for their Partners. It’s just a t-shirt. “What were you asking me about before all of that happened?” Michael asks, still pulling the t-shirt on as he walks into the room.

Ashton immediately draws a blank, distracted. “I have no idea,” he says. He’s not thinking about it.

“Are you okay?” And he’s still not thinking about it. Not thinking about the way the fabric pulls tight across Michael’s shoulders or the fact that his shirt is, in fact, a little too small despite being stretched out. The veins in his arms seem more prominent now that he’s not wearing a shapeless white t-shirt, narrow and blue underneath the skin at both wrists. “Ash,” Michael repeats. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Ashton replies, forcing himself to smile. He pats the couch cushion next to him and Michael plops down on it obligingly, automatically reaching for the holo-glove and flipping through the feeds idly. Michael finds a rerun of ‘Recollection’ that he hasn’t seen and leans back into the couch cushions, so absorbed in the episode that he doesn’t notice when the pizza arrives. Ashton doesn’t mind getting it; he has to swipe for it anyway, since obviously Michael’s thumbprint isn’t registered in the database. He spends the rest of the evening worrying about Michael.

He knows what he’s supposed to do about the situation, obviously. As if he hasn’t spent enough late nights staring at his netportal with his cursor hovering over the ‘Report’ button. But he knows what will happen if he self-reports, and maybe it’s selfish of him to feel this way but he knows that if he has to send Michael away for recalibration the procedure will strip away everything that makes Michael, well… himself. He’s been trying to convince himself that it wouldn’t matter, that he wouldn’t care if Michael came back set back to the factory default settings. It’s getting increasingly more difficult to make himself believe it. They’re not hurting anyone. He glances over at his Partner, wholly absorbed in the holo and gnawing on his thumbnail absentmindedly. How could something so small ever hurt somebody?

He can’t stop his knee from bouncing up and down between the edge of the couch cushion and the coffee table. “Seriously,” Michael says during one of the advert slots, fingers dragging clumsily over Ashton’s jeans. “Are you okay?” The gesture is too familiar for comfort. It should be setting off a thousand red flags in Ashton’s mind. Shouldn’t it? He’s torn between his duty to self-report and his own sense of morality. On top of that, he’s struggling with the burgeoning possessiveness he feels toward Michael that he has no idea how to deal with, so he’s been avoiding the situation entirely by throwing himself into work and hoping for the best. Which clearly isn’t working for him anymore if even Michael is picking up on it. And it niggles at him even more that Calum - his supposed best friend, the person who’s supposed to be the one noticing these things - hasn’t said anything about it to him. It’s all ‘Luke this, Luke that’ and he thinks that Calum doesn’t even realize that he’s talking about his partner like… like… Like a shiny toy, something to play with and possess and then toss aside once the novelty wears off.

Michael repeats the question again. Ashton snaps, “I’m fine,” and presses his body back as far as it will go into the opposite corner of the couch. Even so, his thigh is pressed against Michael’s - it’s a small couch, he’s never felt the need to get a bigger one until just now. It’s fine, he thinks. He leans back against the arm of the couch, determined to keep the gap between them as wide as possible.

It’s hard to relax and focus on the holo when he’s hyperaware of Michael beside him, shifting and fidgeting constantly. He tells himself he’ll watch one episode before bed, then turn in and wake up early in the morning to take a shower before work. Somehow despite his best efforts one episode turns into three - he hadn’t noticed his eyelids growing heavy, his body slumping little by little toward the center of the couch like a magnet being pulled toward its opposite. When he wakes up he’s immediately disoriented by the steady heartbeat he can feel under his ear. There’s a crick in his neck from sleeping in an awkward position. It takes him a while to realize that he’s fallen asleep on Michael. He lies there drifting in and out of dreamless sleep - he doesn’t know for how long; long enough to make his neck and shoulders ache, anyway - and then the next thing he knows is Michael half-carrying him up to the bedroom.

“No,” he protests sleepily, “Put me down, I can walk.”

“Can you?” Michael asks, shifting his grip on Ashton’s thigh as he climbs the stairs. And Ashton had known that he was stronger than he looks, but he hadn’t known exactly how strong. Or maybe he’s not and he’s just stubborn; either way, it’s something that’s actually happening. He’s so, so careful with the way he sets Ashton on his feet outside the bedroom door.

Stubbornly, Ashton juts his chin out and goes, “I could’ve put myself to bed.” He’s not sure he’s acting convincingly; even as he says it his legs wobble underneath him uncertainly. He holds onto the doorjamb for support. “I don’t need you to carry me upstairs like some… some…” And he yawns, mid-sentence. “Damsel in distress,” he finishes. He folds his arms over his chest grumpily and stares at his Partner.

Michael just rolls his eyes and goes, “Uh-huh. You’re so steady on your feet right now that if I do this,” he says, pushing one of Ashton’s shoulders lightly, “you’d catch yourself? You wouldn’t just keep going in whatever direction I push you in?”

“I - fuck off,” Ashton whines, standing up to his full height.

“It’s okay to admit that you need my help sometimes,” Michael says. And pushes Ashton backwards again, only this time he doesn’t catch himself and stumbles back against the bed frame. He’s annoyed by the situation; he doesn’t like being pushed around at the best of times, doesn’t like being man-handled. He doesn’t know what Michael’s playing at here. Before he can ask - before he’s managed to phrase the question appropriately, even - Michael’s at him again and he instinctively raises his arms in self-defense. A yawn claws its way up his throat, which really does not help his case any.

Even when he’s pissed off, he doesn’t dare say that he doesn’t need Michael. “What are you doing?” he asks, instead. He wants to push back and air out some of his frustrations but he knows that this is not the time or place for it. It’s frustrating when he doesn’t get an answer - and there’s that impotent rage welling up inside him, that feeling he pretends doesn’t exist until it threatens to spill over into real life - and he doesn’t realize that he’s curled his hands into fists until his nails dig into the skin of his palms. He’s so mad. Not even because of this, just… The bars of his cage have been widened slightly, but that doesn’t make it feel any less like a cage.

Michael’s hands circle around his wrists, pinning them against his sides. “Stop,” Michael tells him. And before Ashton can react Michael’s surged forward into his personal space, dropped both wrists in favor of holding onto his shoulders. It happens in the space of a single heartbeat: Michael’s hands shift just barely and then they’re kissing, first clumsily - and it does occur to Ashton that this is Michael’s first kiss, vaguely - and then it becomes suddenly intense, and then just like that it’s over.

Ashton stays absolutely still, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never happens. Michael leans slightly back and blinks at him like he can’t quite believe what’s just happened. “I should go to bed,” Ashton says numbly. When Michael doesn’t reply he feels like he should say it again. “I have work in the morning,” he points out.

He’s about to repeat it again when Michael goes, “I know,” and then kisses him again, this time holding his cheeks carefully like he’s trying to make sure he does it properly. It’s not perfect. But it’s good enough to get Ashton’s heart racing, the sound rushing between his ears like a metronome. “Goodnight,” Michael says. He leaves the room in a hurry and without looking back. It’s probably for the better; Ashton stands in front of the bed touching at his mouth until the sound of the door to the laundry room slamming shut startles him out of his trance. He lies back on his bed and stares at the ceiling for a long time after that, just thinking.

Michael kissed him. He kind of wants it to happen again.

 

Ashton oversleeps his alarm for the second day in a row. He groans, swings his legs over the edge of the mattress and pulls on his clothes from the day before. Normally by now he would hear morning noises from the kitchen, smell the coffee as he comes down the stairs, but he doesn’t notice either of those things as he bolts down the stairs two at a time. “Late for work,” he calls into the kitchen. “No time to talk, I’ll see you later.” He’s got just enough time to jam his feet into his boots and sprint to the mag-train platform before he realizes that he’s forgotten his travel mug on the counter. The train is crowded; he stands half-asleep with his arm through one of the loops until he gets to work and stumbles onto the platform with the rest of the herd, too dazed to do anything else. Before he strips down in the commons he goes to the vending area by the lockers and gets himself a coffee. He swallows the whole thing in one go, wincing as the hot beverage scalds the inside of his mouth on the way down. Great start to the morning, he thinks to himself.

He’s about to step through the door to the anti-bac chamber when he feels a hand clamp down on his shoulder. “Irwin,” the voice that the hand belongs to goes. “A moment, if you will?” And it’s safe to say that Ashton was about to leap out of his skin before he realizes that it’s Armstrong. Rather than making him feel better, his thoughts quickly spiral into a panic wondering what it could be about. Still in only his underwear - and he’s more than a little self-conscious about his boxer-briefs and bare legs as they weave through the crowd to the elevator bay. “Fourth floor,” Armstrong tells him, stepping into the tube once the indicator light on the right of the elevator shaft has gone green. Ashton grabs his own disc and follows suit, hovering slowly past the third floor to the offices located on four.

The only time Ashton has ever been up to the fourth floor was the week of orientation and training when he’d first started in the mailroom, and that had largely been dominated by endless reams of paperwork to scroll through and sign off on. He barely remembers any of it, now, but he’d gotten the distinct impression that the offices were a very busy area. Judging by the number of harried-looking interns rushing through the narrow hallways, it seems that he was right. No one spares him a glance as he follows Armstrong in his suit to the very end of the maze of cubicles; he’s glad of it, shivering the way he is in just his underwear and shoes. They stop in a corner office with gleaming eco-glass walls frosted on one side. Ashton sits in one of the chairs on the side of the desk facing the door and waits, expecting something terrible to happen.

“I expect that you’re wondering why I’ve brought you here,” Armstrong says calmly, flipping through a pile of tablets stacked on the desk. He pulls one from the pile and hands it to Ashton. When the screen powers on the company logo is displayed prominently at the top of the document. The rest of it might as well be written in a foreign language - most of it is very official-looking language heavy on legal terms - but obediently Ashton scrolls through the tablet. “I’ve been watching your progress these past weeks,” Armstrong says. He pulls up some datasets on the large holoscreen that dominates most of the available space on the desk and turns it toward Ashton. He talks for a while about Ashton’s performance and something called his error ratio before he pulls up a graph that looks similar to the ones available at the end of every work day to track their productivity in the mail room.

The line veers sharply up and to the right. It doesn’t take an expert to know what this means. “So you want to promote me?” Ashton asks uncertainly.

Armstrong nods. “All you have to do is sign on the dotted line and you’ll have your own office up here with the real go-getters. It’s not much to start,” he says, jerking his head in the direction of the row of low-walled cubicles, “But you’ll rise through the ranks fast, I think.”

“Shouldn’t I read this first?”

“Oh, all that’s just a formality,” Armstrong tells him with a wave of his hand. “It’s the same as the contract you signed when you were hired. Only difference is now you’ll be making twice the credits you were before.” And who is he to argue with twice the amount he was making before? It’s more pay for half the amount of work and steady hours, not to mention the fact that he’ll graduate from the shiny jumpsuits to office attire, which is an infinitely more appealing option. He scrolls through the long document again, scanning for key words as he skims the text. It all seems to be in order, so - under-caffeinated and jumpy from the shock - Ashton presses his thumb down firmly inside the box.

The tablet pings, confirming his choice. “Now what’s going to happen?” he asks, rubbing his arms to keep warm. He’ll have to remember to bring a sweater once he starts working on the fourth floor. Whoever is in charge has cranked the air conditioning; all the vents are blasting streams of cooled air.

“That’s it. If you’d like to collect your things from your old locker, I’ll show you where your new office is.” They weave their way back around the maze of cubicles to an unoccupied one facing a window. It’s not a particularly nice view; it looks over the adjacent office tower, all brick and mortar and glittering glass windows. “Your thumbprint should already be registered in the system if you’d like to give this a try,” Armstrong says, pointing out the thumb scanner on the desk to unlock the drawers. “You’ll have probationary permissions in the database for the first three months. Use your regular login on the holoscreen; I’ll make sure the sysadmins update your profile for you.” Ashton follows Armstrong through the rest of the office, feeling like a baby duck waddling after its mother. He learns where the lunch room is and meets his supervisor, whose name he immediately forgets following their handshake. At the elevator bay when they part ways, Armstrong claps a hand on his bare shoulder again and goes, “I’m sure it’s all a little overwhelming to start, but you’ll catch the hang of it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Ashton says wearily. When he gets to the second floor commons, the large clock in the center tells him that the day is already half over. He collects the few things from his locker and dresses hastily before he catches sight of Calum emerging from the anti-bac chamber. “Hey,” he shouts across the commons, raising his hand in greeting. “I got promoted,” he says proudly when Calum joins him next to the lockers. It’s strange to think that this will no longer be his locker, that he won’t leave his stuff next to Calum’s every morning before his shift.

Calum grins and embraces him briefly. “Congratulations,” Calum says. “You wanna go out for drinks after your shift, then? My treat?”

“I’ll have to take a raincheck on that one,” Ashton says, glancing up at the time. “They’ve got me doing a ton of orientation stuff upstairs, but maybe this weekend?” he asks hopefully. Calum nods before heading in the direction of the second floor lunch room. He doesn’t know why he lies about it. Ashton goes back to the elevator bay and sits at his desk, marveling at how his luck has changed. His cubicle has a small filing cabinet on the other side of the desk. It’s empty right now, but there are four drawers that he assumes that it’s his job to fill with data. No one comes by and tells him what to do, or anything, so Ashton spends the afternoon exploring the databases he now has access to. It’s not very interesting - most of it is financial data that he can’t make heads or tails of - but it seems prudent to at least look like he’s doing something since in reality he has no clue what he’s supposed to be doing. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask what his actual job description was.

The tone chimes at the end of the work day and, not knowing what else to do, Ashton follows the rest of the office workers to the elevators. He goes down the chute after a man in a charcoal suit and waits with the other office staff for the mag-train. On the other end of the platform he sees Calum. Probably he should go and say hello, but he’d rather get home and unwind after what has turned out to be an uncharacteristically strange day. At least things with Michael will be the same - comfortable, familiar, if a little awkward at times - but then he remembers the kiss. A shiver runs through his body; he’s been trying not to think about it. If he thinks about it too much then he’ll think about it happening again. He actually doesn’t know how he feels about that.

Too soon, the mag-train pulls up to the platform near his quarters and he pushes his way through the rush hour crowd of commuters. It’s still light outside; for a moment he considers getting back on the train and going to the downtown sector for a few hours, window-shopping at all the trendy boutiques he’s never been able to afford before now. That seems like something he should wait to do with Calum, though, and then he remembers that if he goes somewhere with Calum they’ll have to bring Luke and Michael and it grates on his nerves a bit. He walks home a little more slowly than he usually does. Shouldn’t he be happier that everything in his life seems to be falling into place? It should be a natural progression, he thinks, but so far all it’s done is make him edgy and paranoid. As soon as he walks through the front door he can smell food cooking. His stomach grumbles, reminding him that aside from burned beverage synthesizer coffee he hasn’t actually eaten anything today.

“Hey, I’m home,” he calls, kicking his boots off on the rug without unlacing them.

It’s easy to find Michael. All he has to do is follow the scents coming from the kitchen; Michael’s humming along to the music playing on his tablet while he cooks. And even Michael’s familiar sight is suddenly unfamiliar to him. He’s wearing a pair of Ashton’s jeans in addition to the borrowed t-shirt from yesterday. They’re just a little short on him so he’s rolled them at the ankles. “Oh,” he says when he realizes that Ashton is staring at him. “You don’t mind, do you? I ripped mine so I just thought…” When Ashton doesn’t respond he frowns and picks at the hem of his shirt hesitantly. “I can change,” he says.

Ashton doesn’t want him to change. He blurts out, “No, it’s… good,” and immediately feels like he wants to put his foot in his mouth. He’s nervous in a way he hasn’t felt since he was still in school. “Should probably get you some of your own stuff anyway,” he muses. The other thing that occurs to him is that he’s not sure if he’s supposed to acknowledge the kiss or not; he’s definitely not going to admit that he liked it if they’re going to pretend that it never happened. He’s not thinking about the way Michael’s legs look in his jeans. That would be… No. The sound of his pulse rushing in his ears confirms that he’s a liar; at least, he is to himself. Then he remembers how the rest of his day went, again, and he tells Michael, “So I got that promotion I told you about.”

“You’re not happy about it?” Michael asks him. Until now he hasn’t really thought about it. He’s been too preoccupied with other things, and it only occurs to him now that perhaps that has been on purpose. It would be easy to believe that this has all been a natural progression, but what if it hasn’t been? What if it’s been an intentional distraction to pull him back in line? What if someone else suspects that Michael is defecting? Paranoia creeps in. Michael comes around to the other side of the countertop and wraps his arms around Ashton briefly.

And Ashton shrugs, afterward. “I’m not sure,” he says. “I mean, they’re paying me more but I’m not sure what it is they’re paying me to do.” He thinks about what he had seen when he’d stood up, pretending to stretch, and scanned the holoscreens in the cubicles around him. The other office workers had been doing absolutely nothing; he’d seen a few games of solitaire. Everyone had had a single window open with surveillance footage running. No one had told Ashton what he was supposed to be surveilling, though, so he had mostly just sat at his desk wondering what to do. Michael hugs him again, this time for longer, and he leans into the embrace gladly. His breath comes out all at once in a frustrated huff. “Today has been weird.”

“It’s only the first day,” Michael reasons. “Maybe things will get better.” This turns out not to be what Ashton wanted to hear; he groans in frustration and presses his face into Michael’s shoulder.

“Calum wants to do something on the weekend to celebrate,” he says, hoping that Michael will remember since he tends to forget when he’s made plans.

Michael groans. Ashton turns his head to look up at his Partner and Michael goes, “Do we have to? I mean, no offense to Calum or anything, it’s just…” he trails off, dragging his bottom lip between his teeth uncertainly. Finally, he sighs and adds, “Luke’s kind of boring to hang out with. He doesn’t want to talk about anything besides how great Calum is. Am I that boring to talk to?”

In the back of his mind Ashton supposes that Luke’s behavior is how Partners are supposed to act, but he doesn’t say so out loud. “You’re more interesting than most people I know,” Ashton says. Michael’s arms stiffen around his waist and then he pulls away quickly. Which wasn’t how he had anticipated that compliment going over, but that seems to be the theme of his day overall. He mumbles an excuse about checking his netportal and retreats to the bedroom to lick his wounds. For a second there he had thought they were having a moment. Clearly Michael does not feel the same way - and how is it that he feels, exactly? - so he’s going to push that to the back of his mind and put it in a box and never think of it again. An hour passes while he watches cute cat videos.

There is another message in his e-net from an unknown sender, looking dark and foreboding with an empty subject line. The body of the message simply says, ‘We know.’ It makes his stomach churn and after reading it he deletes it - although in this day and age nothing is ever truly deleted - and he goes back downstairs, seeking companionship in lieu of comfort. The knot in his stomach could be attributed to hunger, probably. He finds Michael in the laundry room, bundled up in his corner surrounded by junk electronics parts. “Hey,” Michael says once he finally notices Ashton’s presence. The dim blue glow from the touch-screens he’s mounted on the wall, on the side of the dryer, lend him a nearly translucent look. In the strange lighting it looks like he’s developing bags under his eyes, but that’s impossible. Michael doesn’t need sleep. Therefore he can’t be developing bags under his eyes because that would set an actual precedent for worrisome behavior.

“Hey,” Ashton says back. “Can I come in?”

Michael lifts up an edge of the blanket and makes room for Ashton to join him. It’s practically baking underneath the heavy quilts. “I’ve been researching,” Michael tells him, gesturing to the screens all lined up with bits of text across all of them. And since he’s always researching something or other Ashton leans forward and skims the information quickly, frowning once it all clicks into place in his head. Underneath the quilts he reaches for Michael’s hand. Instead of the smooth skin he’s expecting he feels the cut still rough and jagged. The knot in his stomach rearranges itself into a bowling ball. Michael’s skin is cool to the touch.

Desperate for Michael not to ask the question, he shifts closer and says, “Maybe we should invite Calum and Luke to come here instead of going out this weekend.” He’s desperate not to have this conversation, not right now, not today. Carefully, he adds, “Don’t forget we have our first check-in with your handler this week, too.” And then he groans audibly, because he’s been trying not to think about that. Everything in his life is a balancing act of not thinking about the wrong things at the wrong times. To be honest, he’s getting tired of having to think at all. He slumps against Michael’s side, defeated.

The question comes anyway. Michael, eyes still trained on the displays, sighs and asks it. “I’m defective, aren’t I,” he says. Ashton doesn’t answer. He tightens his grasp on his Partner’s hand and closes his eyes. This is not how he had envisioned his day going, from beginning to end. They kissed. Shouldn’t that have meant something? Or is he assigning meaning to something that isn’t there? “Ash,” Michael repeats. “Am I? Defective?”

“Please don’t make me answer that,” Ashton begs him. But he repeats the question in a very non-feedback loop way and Ashton knows there’s no avoiding that, then. He thinks about it for a moment before responding. “You’re not - I mean, you are, but it’s not…” he sighs, dragging his free hand through his hair and probably messing it up even more than usual. “It’s not that simple,” he says. “I don’t want to send you away. I don’t… I don’t want you to go back to the way you were when you first got here.” It makes something in his chest ache to think about. The Michael who had first come home with him and this Michael are not the same; he knows that. He likes the guy who laughs with him and spills things and sneaks into his bedroom when he’s not home to borrow his clothes. Thinking about it, he feels his eyes begin to water. Before it can happen he presses his face into Michael’s shoulder and groans, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You have to,” Michael says. The words come out muffled; he’s pressed his face into Ashton’s hair, fingers twisted in Ashton’s shirt. “I don’t want you to get in trouble. You just got promoted. I don’t want to mess anything up for you.” Ashton groans some more into Michael’s shoulder and balls his fists up ineffectively. Not like they’ve got anywhere to go. He’s got all this anger and jackshit nothing to do with it.

“I don’t want to,” Ashton argues. Why can’t Michael understand?

“You have to,” Michael repeats. He gestures at the screen with the BLITS page pulled up and hovers his pointer finger over the ‘Report’ button. Anger wells up in Ashton’s chest - all the repressed emotions of the day, really - and he swats Michael’s hand away. “We can’t live like this,” Michael points out. “The handler is coming tomorrow. Don’t you think they’ll know something is wrong the second they walk in? You know you have to do this.”

He squeezes his eyes shut tight and huddles against Michael’s chest. “We can pretend,” he says finally. “I’ll do all the cleaning and you’ll just… Fuck, I don’t know, sit there and smile and nod at the guy’s questions.” It’s selfish. It’s selfish, and entirely illegal, and he’s seen people arrested for less than this. He pretends not to notice it happening just like everyone else does - like they’ve been conditioned to, he thinks - but whether or not anyone acknowledges it doesn’t mean that it’s any less real. He thinks of black-clad handlers and plastic zipcuffs and the fear builds up inside his chest until it feels like he can’t breathe. Despite his best attempt at stoppering them up the tears start flowing and he pushes himself further into Michael’s arms. They sit there just like that for a long time before he finally manages to compose himself. “I won’t do it,” he says firmly.

Michael opens his mouth like he’s about to ask why. The obvious question has already been asked and Ashton’s not in the mood to entertain any more questions this evening. Not the obvious kind, and especially not the less-than-obvious kind that means he’ll have to talk about his feelings, particularly the still-tender ones that he’s uncertain of how to deal with. He doesn’t think about it before he does it. He sort of lunges forward and Michael meets him halfway and then they’re kissing, clutching at each other under the heavy quilts until Michael’s long legs crash against the side of the dryer. It startles them both enough that they stop, Michael’s hand still cupping Ashton’s jaw. “Why,” he asks finally. He doesn’t sound upset. That’s a good sign. It has to be a good sign.

“I don’t want you to go away,” Ashton says selfishly. It’s the closest thing to an admission he’s willing to give. Michael asks him why again anyway. He’s tired of arguing, if this can even properly be called an argument, so he sighs instead before answering. “If I send you away they’re going to recalibrate your brain and take all your, like, you-ness away.” He doesn’t know how to articulate it any better than that. Because of course he’s obligated to send Michael for recalibration because he’s not performing the function he was originally conditioned for, but the confusing part lies with Ashton’s lack of want for him to actually fulfill that role. He doesn’t want… He doesn’t want a fucking house-husband, he wants - well, this. He wants someone who challenges him when he’s being stupid and knows it and who laughs at his shitty jokes occasionally. The only other thing he has to say is, “Please don’t go away.” It comes out smaller than he would like, more vulnerable.

And Michael doesn’t argue. “So, pretending,” he says slowly, as if he’s trying out the shape of the word in his mouth.

 

When he gets to his desk in the morning the holoscreen is already open to the surveillance window. Ashton looks around to see what the other office workers are doing and finds most of them staring boredly at their own screens, occasionally stopping to type something in a notepad app before switching between freenet sites for online shopping or the few virtual poker sites that haven’t been banned by the department servers’ firewall. He takes his time getting organized in his cubicle before sitting down in the enormous wheeled office chair. Still no one has come around to tell him what exactly it is that his job is. For now, he’ll sit and watch the surveillance camera until he figures out what to do. Or maybe, he thinks, figuring out what the job is might actually be the job. He’s still shaken from that e-net message; it’s hard not to feel paranoid, like he’s being watched, especially with their handler coming over to check in after he’s done work. Nose to the grindstone, he reminds himself. It feels a bit like conforming. He hasn’t entirely convinced himself that the tie around his neck isn’t going to end up being the noose he hangs himself with.

He watches the surveillance camera until the first tone sounds halfway through the morning, at which time he understands the office workers take a break. Briefly he wonders who watches the cameras during that time, but he supposes that given the dangerous precipice he’s already backed himself onto, he’s better off not knowing. And he doesn’t know anyone else from the cubicles, so while they stand in a huddle on the balcony he stands awkwardly by the transparent glass-paned doors and wishes he had worn a sweater. At least when he had been in the mail room there was always Calum. Ashton has been trying really hard not to reflect on the fact that it’s Calum he’s watching on the surveillance camera, Calum and the new guy who had taken his place without so much as a raised eyebrow over the whole thing. The day passes by like this, in fits and starts. By midday he’s grown so bored that he turns to the workplace-approved comedy sites for at least something to do.

It’s a lonesome sort of thing, he thinks, doing this sort of work. Only it’s not really work if all he’s doing is watching someone else live out their life. He can’t understand where the value is in having someone sit in front of a screen all day doing nothing. By the end of the day there’s a shiny placard on the outside of his cubicle with his name and the title ‘Security Consultant’ printed on it.

“Well, that explains that,” Ashton says to himself, looking at it while he puts on his jacket at the end of the day. He shuffles along with the other office workers and gets on the mag-train, grinding his teeth the whole way home. The usual adverts play out on the windows. Underneath his veneer of calm he feels frantic and trapped, sure that as soon as he gets home something awful is going to happen - the handler is going to be there or Michael won’t be ready or some of any countless number of small disasters that could happen between now and 1800 hours.

They had spent all evening handler-proofing their quarters. Still, when he thumbs open the lock Ashton is half-expecting it to have all been undone during the day. Michael is pacing the hallway between the kitchen and laundry room anxiously when he comes in, clearly more worked up about the check-in than he had pretended in the morning. “I can’t do this,” Michael says, fiddling with the knobs on the linen closet door.

Ashton kicks his shoes off in the usual place and drops his bag on the floor. “You’re going to be fine,” he tells his Partner. Thinking better of it, he hangs his bag up on one of the coat hooks by the door and straightens his shoes self-consciously. He decides that he’d better leave the tie on, too, even though it feels like it’s slowly choking him to death. “Does this help me project an air of ‘I know what the fuck I’m doing’?” he asks, tugging at the end of it forlornly. He’s twenty-three years old and he still doesn’t know how to tie a tie properly. The knot is crooked and the thin end of the tie hangs down past the wide part.

“Not quite,” Michael teases him. His hands tremble slightly as he works the knot of Ashton’s tie open and fixes it properly. Once he’s finished, he gives it a once-over and nods approvingly at his own handiwork. They’re both too tightly-wound, hovering just out of arms’ reach of each other for a moment too long. Ashton forces himself to step away knowing that as much as he wants to set all of his frustrations aside and just be with Michael, if he does it right now he’s going to lose the frustrated, overworked veneer he’s been slowly building up all day. He wants to appear flustered and stressed out and just incredibly, incredibly grateful for the work BLITS does that means he doesn’t have to work as hard when the workday ends and he can enjoy his supposed freedom. Even the thought disgusts him. The idea of this enforced domesticity thing rankles at him while he sits on the edge of the couch cushion staring at a random holo.

By the time the doorbell sounds it feels like time has been dragging on so slowly that it takes Ashton a minute to react. “I’ve got it,” he says to no one in particular. Out of curiosity, he peers through the little viewhole in the door to see what lies on the other side. He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it’s certainly not the tall, willowy guy on the other side of the door dressed in a black turtleneck under his heavy handler’s vest, not the expensive-looking leather gloves or the well-worn boots that land heavy on the floors. “Come on in,” Ashton says awkwardly.

The handler ignores his greeting and shoves his badge at Ashton. There’s no name on it, just his handler number - 05-1190 - and as soon as he enters, his eyes are flicking from side to side studying everything inside the building. “You can call me Beckett,” he says, whipping a palmtab out from some hidden pocket of his neatly pressed black trousers. “Sign here, please,” he says impatiently. Ashton presses his thumb down and waits for the chime confirming that his print has registered. Beckett paces around the front hallway and drags one gloved finger against the wall before inspecting the fingertip of his glove. “So,” Beckett goes, reading something off the palmtab quickly. “Activation date shows as one month ago; have you experienced any difficulty since the initial activation?”

“No, sir,” Ashton lies, crossing his fingers behind his back and praying to whatever entities exist that he doesn’t get caught in his lie.

Beckett continues through the quarters, investigating the holo setup in the main living room with disinterest. “I see you’ve recently gotten a promotion at work,” he continues, tapping off items on what Ashton is sure must be a checklist. He keeps swiping his gloved fingers across surfaces and checking for dust, or something. It’s making Ashton nervous and he’s sure that his subconscious tics are going to give the whole thing away. Nothing in the room seems to arouse suspicion from Beckett. They move onto the back hallway - Michael’s touch-screens and various other gadgets are in the linen closet, hidden behind the extra blankets after they’d folded them up - and the laundry room without remark. When they poke their heads into the bedroom Ashton notices that at some point during the day Michael had taken the time to make sure both sides of the bed look equally slept-on. He files that thought away to be dealt with later; he doesn’t need to be entertaining thoughts about that while their handler is still in the house poking around their carefully constructed lies.

In the kitchen, Michael’s prodding at a stir-fry in a way that Ashton knows is definitely sullen but he’s hoping that Beckett reads as indifferent. “Hey,” he says, making sure Beckett sees him place a hand on Michael’s waist. “I can watch this for a second. Go talk to your handler, he has some tests he needs to run or something.” And he tries to keep his tone even despite his heart jackhammering its way steadily out of his chest; Michael leans into his touch for a millisecond before nodding placidly and joining Beckett on the other side of the counter. Ashton focuses on stirring the food.

Out of the corner of his eye he watches Michael sit cooperatively while Beckett uses some attachment on the palmtab to prick his fingertip and take a blood sample. He hadn’t been prepared for that; no one ever told them what happens during handler check-ins and he doesn’t know if they could have convincingly faked the biological components of Partnership. He holds his breath while Beckett gives Michael a once-over - reflex test with a sturdy rubber mallet to the knee, a penlight to check both eyes, another attachment to the palmtab to take his temperature and heart rate. All they can hope is that he manages to act convincingly. Basically, they’re screwed, he thinks, unless Beckett turns out to be one of those bleeding hearts who’s willing to believe that this is all first-time jitters.

“Alright,” Beckett says finally. “One last test and then you should be good to go.” He instructs Michael to take off his socks - which, really, what the fuck - and he pulls out yet another attachment for the palmtab and runs the sensor over the sole of Michael’s foot. Ashton bites the inside of his cheek hard and grips the spatula tighter. Michael shoots him a panicked look but luckily Beckett’s head is still bent down over the palmtab so he doesn’t notice. Once the data is logged Beckett stands and dusts off the knees of his trousers neatly.

“Is that it?” Ashton asks cautiously.

Beckett slides the tablet back into his pocket. “Are you satisfied with your Partner’s performance?” he asks. Ashton nods, still clutching the spatula as if it could defend him from the handler’s gaze. “Under federal law I’m required to remind you of the penalty for not returning your Partner for routine maintenance should the need arise, and in accordance with the law if you notice any anomalies you are required to log them within twenty-four hours for investigation. Failure to comply with this act can result in federal charges and disbarment from any future holdings from BLITS or its subsidiaries. And I’ll need one last signature here,” Beckett says, pulling out a paper copy of the Partnership initiative act. Ashton signs it. No more conversation passes between the two as Ashton walks the handler to the door. “We’ll see you next month as scheduled,” Beckett says in lieu of a goodbye. The door swishes closed behind him on its tracks, and once he’s disappeared into the night Ashton slumps against the door’s cool metal surface and breathes a sigh of relief.

Michael pokes his head out from the kitchen and asks, “Is it over?” Ashton can hear the telltale sign of the disposal unit chewing up the stir-fry. It had all been for show, anyway. Neither of them particularly like stir-fry; it was just the easiest thing that either of them could think of to make on short notice.

“Yeah, it’s done,” Ashton confirms. He tugs the tie until it comes undone and leaves it discarded in a pile on top of his shoes, glad to finally be free of it. All that stress and, he realizes as he checks the time on the holo directory, the entire thing took less than thirty minutes to complete. Michael flops down on the couch next to him, tablet already in hand ready to order a pizza for delivery. “That stuff about logging anomalies seriously freaked me out,” he admits.

“Do you think he knows?” And Michael tugs at him until they’re curled up together on the little couch, fumbles with the top buttons of Ashton’s shirt until the collar comes undone. “For the record, I think my feet are incredibly ticklish. I thought I was going to… die, or something. Felt like being electrocuted.” Like most things, as soon as Michael has implicitly told him not to do something, Ashton is struck by the irresistible urge to do it. He leans over and drags the tip of his finger across the sole of Michael’s foot and, predictably, Michael yelps and jerks his foot away. “Don’t,” he whines. So of course Ashton does it again, this time more softly. “I said don’t,” Michael whines again. “Stop it, or I’ll…”

“You’ll what?” Ashton asks.

Michael rolls his eyes and mumbles something into Ashton’s shoulder. “Stop touching my feet,” he whines again. “I’ll fight you,” he says. Which is not a very convincing argument, given the way he wraps himself so completely around Ashton, pulling him into a cuddle with arms draped over Michael’s shoulders. It does absolutely nothing for Ashton’s mildly self-effacing desire to push the boundaries between them. He continues running his fingertips over whatever bare skin he can find softly, memorizing Michael’s reactions as he squirms and whines while they wait for the pizza to arrive. Eventually they come to a kind of compromise of Ashton draped over him, stroking the side of his neck absently while they watch an old episode of ’10 Seconds’. They spend most of the evening lying on the couch eating pizza and watching dumb net-dramas. Ashton pretends not to be worrying about everything still; he’s convinced that Michael can see through it, but if he does he hasn’t said anything about it. For the moment he’s content to watch bad reality dramas with the pads of his fingers pressed against the back of Ashton’s neck.

Predictably, Ashton falls asleep at some point and wakes up mid-journey to the bedroom disoriented and disgruntled at being carried a second time. “Put me down,” he demands. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep; the last thing he remembers is the soothing monotony of some home design show and Michael’s nails scraping against his hairline. He teeters on his feet for a brief but terrifying second before he manages to right himself using the doorway as a support. When did the rest of his shirt buttons get undone, he wonders vaguely, looking down at the tails of his shirt hanging loose around his hips.

“Okay, princess,” Michael says with a smirk. Ashton doesn’t appreciate that smirk one bit - in fact, he thinks he might hate it. He’s still in what could be considered a foul mood, the mood not having passed despite the lateness of the hour. And so the nickname might be a reflection on his bad mood. Either way, it opens something wide in Ashton’s chest that he’s been avoiding for… well, nearing on a month now. He realizes too late that he’s been standing in his doorway just staring when one of Michael’s eyebrows quirks up and he asks, “You good?”

He considers it. “Come to bed with me,” he says, surprised when Michael actually follows him across what he’s recently begun thinking of as a forbidden threshold. And then when Michael strips out of the white BLITS-issued t-shirt he goes, “Wait, what are you doing?” followed by a jaw-cracking yawn.

Michael pauses, long arms tangled in the scratchy fabric over his head. “You asked me,” he starts to say. There’s a long pause as he puts together the pieces and then he asks, “Was that supposed to be a rhetorical thing instead of a sex thing?” And this is the closest they’ve come in the past few days to acknowledging the weird not-thing blooming between them. This is an admission, almost, of some kind of feeling. Michael starts to put the hated shirt back on, which is the wrong thing.

“No, don’t,” Ashton says. He’s sort of embarrassed by the situation he’s unintentionally created for himself; he had only meant that he wanted to sleep with Michael beside him, not the other thing, and Michael… Well. He doesn’t know what it says about them that Michael had immediately jumped to it being a thing about sex. Ashton’s head spins with it, thinking about Michael wanting to have sex with him. One thing he does know is that he’s not ready for that yet. Kissing is okay, he thinks. Something like that feels big and important and if they’re going to do that he wants to make sure that Michael is absolutely doing it for the right reasons, not just because Ashton wants to. He gets so caught up in his own embarrassment that he gets lost in it. “Just,” he mumbles, feeling the heat rise at the back of his neck, his cheekbones. “Lie down with me, anyway.”

This time it’s Ashton who holds up the edge of the blanket for Michael to climb under, nerves frayed with anticipation over some unspoken thing waiting to happen. “Sorry,” Michael tells him. “That was dumb.” It was, but not for the reasons he’s thinking of.

“It’s okay,” Ashton whispers. “It was a stupid thing to ask for.”

He puts a net-drama on, partly to lull himself to sleep the way he usually does but more because he’s worried that Michael will get bored of him. Of lying there quietly in the dark all night while he sleeps, doing whatever he does during the time that Ashton’s not there. A long while later, when Ashton’s hovering in that spot between asleep and not-asleep all heavy thoughts and limbs, he scoots closer on the mattress and drapes his arm over Ashton’s waist. “Goodnight,” he whispers. Ashton has to hold himself back from his sudden desire to scoot backward, line their bodies up neatly so he can fall asleep pressed against Michael. It’s stupid.

It doesn’t stop him from doing it still, shifting himself inch by inch until he’s properly tucked under Michael’s arm and the blankets in equal parts. “‘Night,” he mumbles, mouth slack against the pillow. He lies there with his eyes closed for a long time before he actually falls asleep, taking in their twin heartbeats and the way Michael’s arm curves around him, the way he’s still despite how much he tends to fidget during the day. Sometime much later - maybe it is the middle of the night, maybe a few minutes later - he feels Michael’s mouth against his shoulder, the shape of Michael’s mumbled words. It feels like it’s burning a hole into him.

 

The weekend comes without incident or fanfare. Ashton wakes up in the morning and stares blearily at the time on his netportal unblinking, wondering whether he can make it down to the mag-train platform in time. He’s about to get out of bed and maybe splash some cold water on his face, reaching out of habit to shut the alarm off when he realizes that the alarm hasn’t gone off yet. It takes some thought to figure out what had woken him. He groans, pulls the blankets over his head and rolls over. The other side of the bed is cold, he realizes. Still sleep-addled, he thinks that it’s nice that the pillows smell like Michael. Then it occurs to him that Michael’s not there. After almost a week of sleeping together Ashton has almost gotten used to their morning routine. With a sigh, he gets out of bed. No point having a lie-in if he’s not going to be able to go back to sleep. It’s a little pathetic, but he sleeps so much better with someone beside him. He’s trying not to think too hard on that.

They still haven’t talked about it. Michael keeps trying to and he keeps avoiding it, hesitant to put a label on what might actually be Michael’s conditioning working properly. He goes into the laundry room, ducks underneath the blanket draped over top of the dryer and crawls into the blanket fort. “Morning,” he says, reaching over Michael’s outstretched legs to steal some coffee from his mug. It’s warm still; once he’s drained half the cup he scans the screens and finds an array of information about old-world video games. Somehow this is not surprising. “Wh’t time is it,” he yawns, settling himself carefully on the pile of spare pillows they’ve amassed beside the mess of parts and various tools Michael has made on the floor.

“No idea,” Michael tells him. “Been up since it was dark out. Calum and Luke are coming over this afternoon,” he says, swiping over to the calendar on one of his screens quickly. He lets Ashton drink the rest of the coffee and doesn’t complain when he stumbles out of the blanket fort to seek more. Once he’s finished with the coffee Ashton stands in front of the refrigerator with the door open and eats leftover pizza from the box. It’s early enough that he stays there staring into it until he feels Michael’s arms around him and Michael goes, “You’re letting all the cold air out.”

“That’s an urban legend.” It’s probably not, actually, but for the moment Ashton’s distracted. He shoves the rest of the slice of pizza he’s been munching on into his mouth and closes the door sheepishly. They waste the morning on trying to put together an old holoscreen and a bizarre combination of gaming console parts. Where Michael gets the ideas for half the shit he tries to do Ashton has no idea, but he guesses that’s the downside to literally never needing to sleep. By the time the afternoon rolls around their hands are greasy and stained with equal parts canned air and synthetic oil from trying to unscrew different parts of the old machines. Their mouths are kiss-swollen, too, but that’s another of the myriad things he’s trying to avoid thinking about ever, so all he says when they get out of the blanket fort is, “You’ve got something, just,” and then he reaches to wipe the dark spot off Michael’s neck. At the same time Michael leans forward and kisses him, closes the small gap between them until their bodies are pressed together properly.

When they pull apart Michael’s flushed across his cheeks. He goes, “Meant to do that earlier but I got distracted, sorry.”

Ashton’s torn between kissing him stupid and punching him. Instead of doing either he touches his mouth lightly, like he can’t believe Michael kissed him - though that’s how they’ve been spending most of their time recently - and says, “Come on, Calum and Luke are going to be here soon to watch the game.” He knows it’s not either of their idea of a good time, but Ashton’s really trying to go for the whole ‘picture of normalcy’ thing in light of the impending doom that it feels like is constantly hanging over his head. And Michael asks, again, what the rules of the game are and Ashton doesn’t know. He’s never really followed sports.

Technically, there is only one sport in New Australia and that sport is all of them at once. It’s a complicated-looking thing called simply ‘ball’ and it features an oblong leather ball with ridges to grip. The premise, as far as Ashton and Michael have been able to surmise, is that one team is supposed to carry the ball from one end of the field to the other without it getting intercepted and successfully throw it into one of the scoring zones. Somewhere in there bats are involved that seem to be entirely used for beating the shins of the opposing team. In short, the entire thing is a clusterfuck and Calum is utterly obsessed with it, has been since he was on the team in school. “I still don’t understand why we’re watching this,” Michael says, flipping the holos on to the pre-game show. He rolls his eyes at the announcers - one of them is not aging well and trying to cover it up with a badly maneuvered combover.

“Because we want people to see how normal and well-adjusted you are, or something,” Ashton tells him. They’ve ordered pizza and beer for delivery; the only thing they’re waiting for, aside from that, is Luke and Calum to show up. The mag-trains are probably packed with people on their way to the stadium to watch New Sydney play against Perth. That had been part of the reason Ashton had suggested a get-together rather than going out somewhere; he’s never been much for large crowds of people. Also, the likelihood of a handler noticing Michael’s behavior in public almost outweighs any kind of activity that he could find enjoyable enough to grit his teeth and deal with the Saturday crowds for.

Michael frowns at the ‘well-adjusted’ comment but doesn’t voice his complaints, for once. “You’re lucky I like you,” he decides, draping himself over Ashton’s shoulders for a moment. If they weren’t pressed for time Ashton might ask him how he means that - in his head he’s already started over-analyzing the thousands of different meanings that could’ve had. “Go get the door,” he says, pressing his mouth to Ashton’s cheek quickly before letting go.

The doorbell goes off a few seconds later. It’s an annoyingly useful trick of Michael’s to know when sounds will go off before they actually do. “Hey,” Ashton says upon the door swishing open. “Come on in, I ordered pizza and booze, game’s going to start soon.”

He’s relieved that Calum instantly launches into an explanation of the game - solely for his benefit, he’s sure - and Ashton half-listens as they get situated on the couch, feeling like he should be doing something but unable to figure out quite what that is. “Oh,” Calum says when he finally pauses in his spirited explanation of the different types of ball. “Right, what do you want me to do with Luke while we watch this?” Ashton hadn’t really thought about it - he’d assumed that Michael and Luke would stay with them. Michael’s sat on the arm of the couch right next to him, playing with the fabric of his shirt absentmindedly. It would look bad, though, for Ashton not to have thought ahead about it. He feels the pinch of Michael’s fingernails against the back of his neck, cleverly hidden by his hair where it’s gotten too long and almost touches his chin at its longest.

“We can throw a film on for them in the other room,” Ashton says quickly, figuring that it is the easiest way to keep Luke occupied and give Michael something to do for an hour or two while the game goes on. Calum nods like he doesn’t really care - and he doesn’t seem to, really. “Okay. Can you go set it up, babe?” he asks, a moment later realizing that the word had slipped out without his permission. Calum gives him a weird look. Thankfully he doesn’t say anything, but it’s obvious that he thinks it’s strange from his demeanor. Ashton tries not to worry about the tight, closed-off body language he’s getting from his supposed best friend. It’s probably not anything, he tells himself. He hasn’t been around much in the last week or so. “I’ve been a crap friend this week, haven’t I?” he asks after Michael has shepherded Luke off into their bedroom.

Calum shrugs. “You’ve had a lot going on,” he says carefully. “I’ve been meaning to ask how your first check-in went. Ours was the other day. Handler’s kind of a dick, but what can you do?” And they both laugh awkwardly though no joke has been made, brimming with nervous tension over the fact that their friendship might be slowly dying. Ashton doesn’t know how to salvage it or even if he wants to. One thing he’s been learning as he spends more time with Michael is that he does best around people who challenge him instead of constantly toeing the party line, and Calum definitely seems to be in the latter category.

“I think all handlers are pre-programmed to be dicks,” Ashton says. He thinks about Beckett and his long, long limbs like something dark and spidery waiting to attack. The thought sends icy fingers down his spine. Quickly he changes the subject around to who Calum thinks is going to win the game and they make a stupid little bet of it; the pizza arrives and the game begins and they occupy themselves with watching it, Calum occasionally heckling the players on the Perth team. “They can’t hear you, you know,” Ashton reminds him at halftime.

“Can’t help it,” Calum says around a mouthful of pizza. “So how are things with you and Michael? Are you guys, like,” he says, and makes an obscene hand gesture that Ashton truly could have gone his whole life without ever seeing.

“Not that,” Ashton says, covering his face with both hands. It’s not that he’s a prude. Calum’s just… one of those guys that, like, tells everyone who will listen about his sex life. Which is uncomfortable enough on its own, but it adds an entirely new dimension of discomfort every time Ashton thinks about the fact that Luke can’t really consent to any of it. Calum nudges him in the side and tells him to man up. The exchange makes him want to sink into the couch cushions and disappear. He hopes that Michael is at least having better luck with Luke; he knows that Michael finds his friend’s Partner boring but surely boredom is better than uncomfortable sexual innuendoes.

“So how’s the promotion going?” Calum asks after a while. They’ve run out of other things to talk about finally. Ashton can’t tell if he’s glad of it or just bored. He’s stopped paying attention to the ball game, has no idea what the score is anymore. The beer only serves to numb his indifference and even now it’s still managing to nag at his consciousness at least a little bit. He makes up some lie about how his new position is going, anything he can say to disguise the fact that he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing. And Calum accepts it; he nods and pats Ashton on the shoulder fondly and goes, “Well, good for you, man.”

“Yeah,” Ashton says. “I’ll be right back,” he says afterward, and excuses himself to the bathroom for a moment’s peace and quiet. He doesn’t actually use the toilet or anything. Just sits there on the toilet thinking with his head in his hands, half-listening to the Disney film Michael has put on in the other room. He can’t stop thinking about how he’d much prefer to be in the other room with Michael, lazing about on the bed watching whatever stupid thing he’s decided to put on half-heartedly while they cuddle. Before he goes back down to the game he pokes his head into the bedroom to see what Michael and Luke are doing. “Hi,” he says.

Michael perks up almost immediately at the sound of his voice and slides off the end of the bed to embrace Ashton. “Hey,” he says softly in Ashton’s ear. “Are you having fun?” His fingers sneak up under the hem of Ashton’s shirt, mouth pressed to Ashton’s temple as he speaks.

“Not really,” Ashton admits. Luke’s sitting on the edge of the bed closest to the wall, completely engrossed in the shitty holo of ‘Lion King’ flickering between high-definition and standard. Michael makes a sound of understanding and hugs him tighter. “I should get back down there,” he says. The sound is muffled by his mouth being pressed against Michael’s collarbone in an almost-kiss. “I’m probably missing some riveting ball action or something.” And again he worries that he’s being a bad friend, but the simple truth of the matter is that they’ve run out of things to talk about. He’s kind of drunk - not blackout drunk, not middle of the night hugging the toilet drunk, but buzzed to the point that he’s a little unsteady on his feet and might say things he regrets, later - and he chalks it up to that that he presses his lips to Michael’s quickly before leaving the room.

The second act of the ball game is no more interesting than the first but Ashton still watches it, trying to decipher the calls made by the referees with commentary by Calum. “That was a bullshit call,” Calum decides after one of his players has been yellow-flagged. “There was no contact!” They watch the instant replay of the move in question and Ashton despairs at ever being done with this game. It’s at moments like this that he’s glad he grew up essentially without a father figure in his life; undoubtedly he would have been exposed to more ball than he’s ever wanted to partake in and even this is… a bit much.

Ashton pops the tab on another beer can and swallows the liquid without really tasting it. He’d rather be drunk than listen to more of this. He’s on the verge of considering Luke lucky - at least he can sit through Calum’s sports commentary without wanting to gouge his own eyes out because he’s conditioned to sit quietly and agree. By the time the game ends Ashton’s properly drunk, slumped over the arm of the couch staring at the holo for lack of anything else to do. Calum’s pulled his palmtab out to track the odds of some bet he’s made over the game; he keeps angrily tapping the screen as the payout fluctuates further and further from his favor. They say their goodbyes with Calum hanging off Luke’s waist, already getting too handsy for Ashton’s liking. The door swishes closed with a familiar click. Ashton doesn’t think he’s ever been so relieved to see someone leave his house, and that’s if he includes Beckett in that number.

“That was… weird,” Michael says afterward. Ashton’s a little buzzed still, lying in the blanket fort with his legs over Michael’s as they catch up on the week’s episodes of ‘Recollection’. They’ve rearranged things so that Michael’s leaning against the corner where the walls meet with his feet poking out the end of the fort. “Luke is so boring,” he complains, shifting his hand where it’s resting at the small of Ashton’s back. “No matter what I did all he would talk about is Calum. Was I ever that bad?” He sounds genuinely concerned.

In response Ashton shakes his head. “At least you didn’t have to listen to sports talk for hours,” he groans. “I thought I was going to smother Calum with a throw pillow at one point. Also,” he grimaces, “You didn’t have to awkwardly endure Calum telling me about their sex life. There are some things I never want to know.”

Michael kisses the top of his head affectionately. “I only want to hang out with you from now on. Everyone else sucks.” It’s strictly the alcohol talking when Ashton reaches up and kisses Michael stupid. He hasn’t been thinking about it all day, or anything. It comes so easily to both of them that it’s just about the only time Ashton stops second-guessing himself and gives himself completely into it. They’re both so comfortable with it - with each other - that it feels natural to let Michael take the lead. Sometimes he has trouble remembering that it’s only been like this for a week; it feels like so much longer than that and he knows it’s a lie, but it’s the kind of lie he doesn’t want to poke holes in. He’s happier by the time they pull apart, both panting and flushed, and Michael tells him, “Fuck, I like you so much.” And he doesn’t have the excuse of being drunk to hide behind, so the words are sincere.

“I like you too,” Ashton confesses.

They’re lying close under the blankets and Michael is stroking his hair in that way he does sometimes. “I wish there could be more than this,” he says quietly. There’s a note of sorrow to his tone that Ashton can’t place. His hands shift until one of them is cradling Ashton’s shoulder. “I wish you could be mine as much as I belong to you.”

It’s the most stupidly romantic thing Ashton has ever heard. He has to hide his face until it feels like his cheeks are no longer on fire. “You’re stupid,” he tells Michael. “I am yours, though. In all the ways that matter.” There isn’t a word for what this means to him. Partners isn’t a strong enough word for what this feels like; it feels bigger, something light and joyous bursting out of his chest that doesn’t have any rules or restrictions. It feels real and whole. He hasn’t decided if he loves Michael or not. And it would be impossible to tell, even if he did, whether it was genuine emotion or something manufactured according to plan.

As a whole Ashton is not a fan of things going according to plan. Take, for example, his promotion - slightly unsatisfying and confusing, enough to make him feel on edge while he’s in his cubicle despite not knowing what it is he’s supposed to be doing, but uncomfortable in the way that would make life ten times more uncomfortable were he to quit. Despite his general disdain for materialism he’s quite enjoying how happy it makes Michael to be able to requisition whatever junky electronic parts he wants whenever he wants. And so for that reason alone he probably wouldn’t quit, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it. He wants something more than this, too, but he’s not sure he has it in him to want.

 

Days give way to weeks somehow and the world continues on very much as it was before. Ashton sits alone in the lunch room and brings his coffee from home in the mornings. He’s gotten quite good at the crossword puzzle that comes with the morning tabloids; the majority of mornings he spends doing his crosswords and occasionally glancing up at the surveillance footage to note down if anything interesting happens. There have been murmurings around the cubicles of something to do with quarterly reports. As far as he’s able to tell, it involves compiling all the notes he’s made and submitting them to his direct supervisor. He tries not to worry too much about it, and sure enough a form appears on his desk one day with ‘Quarterly Report’ across the top. It takes an entire afternoon to fill out, transcribing his notes from the holoscreen to paper.

He doesn’t speak to Calum again, save when they run into each other on the mag-train platform and make awkward small talk until the train arrives, both huddled against one of the pillars under the main floor of the building to stay out of the rain. Neither of them ask how the other’s Partner is; Ashton suspects that Calum doesn’t actually care and he’s mildly horrified from the last time they spoke about Luke. The worse part of it all is that since they were once best friends they’re still expected to act like it. He’s not sure that either of them want to, anymore. Every time he thinks about it he thinks he’d rather have hung out with Luke and Michael that day. And it really says something that he thinks Luke is the more engaging of the pair. It leaves Ashton with a bad taste in his mouth as he rides the mag-train home alone once he and Calum part ways at the usual stop. He keeps his eyes trained on the adverts and ignores the pair of handlers sat at the front of the car.

Everything is perfectly average. “Does it ever bother you that everything is the same all the time?” he asks Michael one night.

“As long as I get to stay with you, I don’t really care,” Michael says. He keeps saying things like this - things that make Ashton blush and squirm and laugh - and it’s almost like they are in a real relationship. It pains him how much he wants it to be real for both of them. “I love you,” Michael tells him later, and those are words that nearly make Ashton’s heart stop. He repeats it again a moment later, thinking that Ashton hasn’t heard it the first time.

Ashton doesn’t ask Michael if he’s sure the way he had thought he would if this day ever came. Instead he sits silently for a while and thinks about it and finally he says, “I love you too,” from under the blankets in the relative safety of their bed. He had expected it to be a bigger moment than this. All that comes of it is Michael grinning stupidly and pulling him closer, caging him into a long cuddle that ends in Ashton dozing off earlier than he had anticipated.

He wakes up to the droning sound of his alarm for the first time in weeks. Beside him, Michael lets out a startled yelp and sits bolt upright in bed. “Shit,” he says under his breath. “Shit, shit, shit.” And at first Ashton doesn’t understand his panic - he’s still getting past the alarm going off and pulling him out of a deep sleep - but then Michael yawns and rubs the sleep from his eyes and it finally sinks in how entirely screwed they are. “What happened?” Michael asks him, clearly confused.

“I’m guessing you fell asleep,” Ashton says.

Michael blinks at him and shakes his head. “That’s impossible. I don’t need sleep,” he tries to argue. The argument would be more compelling if not for the fact that he yawns directly after delivering it, looking confused and appalled. His hair is flat on the side he’d slept on and there are distinct lines imprinted on his cheek from the pillowcase. No matter what he says, the evidence is right there. He’s still all bleary-eyed and disoriented like someone who hadn’t slept in a while, maybe. Ashton stares at the time on his netportal, tries to reason with himself. This is not the end of the world, he repeats over and over in his head until the words lose their meaning. It’s not the end of the world. Michael curls up on the bed and pulls the blanket over his head while making a small whining noise. “I’m sorry,” he says again and again.

This is an unexpected turn of events. Ashton turns back to the netportal, fully intending to shut the alarm off and get on with his day, but he’s discovered that he doesn’t particularly want to. Instead he clicks over to his work portal and signs himself in as absent for the day, checks off the ‘illness’ radio button and submits his selection with his pulse hammering in between his ears like an ocean. “It’s okay,” he says afterward, pushing himself up against the line of Michael’s back. He kisses Michael’s shoulder and tries to steady his own breathing. “We’re going to be okay.”

“How is any of this okay? You should have sent me back the second you realized what was happening. You can go to jail for this, Ash. Game over,” Michael says grimly. And it’s true - it is a federal offense not to self-report or submit an investigation request for the Partner of someone else if it’s suspected that they’re defecting - and Ashton lies flat on his back staring at the ceiling, wondering how the hell he’s going to pull himself out of this wreck. He doesn’t even know if it’s possible to fake the biofeedback results that the handlers measure at each visit. He’s considering it somewhat of a miracle that they hadn’t been discovered with their first check-in. Best not to think about it, he decides, and hope and pray that everything turns out alright. It’s been working for them so far. Eyes closed, arms outstretched to brace the impact of whatever happens.

Ashton sighs heavily. “I don’t know, okay, it just has to be okay because I don’t know what else to do.” Dwelling on it will only make things worse. He spends the next ten minutes or so stealthily tugging the blankets away from Michael, who remains curled in a tight ball facing the wall. By Ashton’s estimation - and like his credits he hasn’t been keeping a very watchful eye on the calendar thanks to the knot of anxiety it causes in his chest - they have another few days before their second check-in, so maybe they can figure out a solution before the time comes. He thinks of the messages that have continued to pop up occasionally in his e-net and wonders if there might be something to them.

The most recent one had simply said ‘They know.’ It had come in the middle of the night on one of Michael’s restless nights - after an hour of cuddling he had been too restless to settle beside Ashton, still - and he had stared at it in horror for a few minutes and laid there for the rest of the night trying to put it out of his mind. It’s all very cloak and dagger; Ashton can’t figure out where the messages are coming from, though he feels like he should probably know. “Am I overreacting?” Michael asks some time later, after he’s uncurled and his breathing has returned to normal.

“Maybe just a little bit,” Ashton tells him. He manages to coax Michael out of bed and - remembering his teen years - he grabs two mugs out of the cupboard in the kitchen and shoves them under the beverage synthesizer for some coffee. “Drink this,” he says, “It’ll help.” Michael frowns at the mug, looking decidedly unimpressed with the taste of the coffee and firmly cementing Ashton’s belief that all those mugs of coffee they’d shared were solely for his benefit. The caffeine will help, though, he thinks. And maybe if caffeine is  the solution then everything will be okay; maybe this is something they can fake by caffeine-loading Michael and tempering it with alcohol for a numbing kind of effect. Except that that could also end disastrously due to the lowered inhibitions that alcohol can cause. Somehow Ashton thinks that Michael would be more likely, not less, to say or do something stupid in front of Beckett that way.

Never mind that idea, then. “This tastes awful,” Michael complains. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever tasted. Why am I drinking this?”

Ashton kisses his cheek and tells him, “You’re crabby in the mornings.” It gives him pause when he runs his fingertips along Michael’s jaw, angling himself for a proper kiss, and the pads of his fingers catch on something rough and prickly. That’s stubble, he realizes, dragging his fingers over it a second time. And it cements the fact that they are both utterly fucked; now that he’s looking more closely he can see all the fine dark hairs emerging. “You need a shave,” he says. Michael eyes him suspiciously over the coffee mug he’s holding. “I’m serious,” Ashton insists. “Feel it. You’re all prickly.”

Michael touches his face and frowns. “What the fuck,” he goes. He runs his fingers over it a few more times wonderingly. Somehow it makes him look a bit older. Ashton considers for a moment making him keep it the way it is, but that would be counter to the point of the whole pretending thing they’ve been doing. It does look quite attractive, though. He likes the look of Michael all groggy and mussed-up. If he thinks about anything else right now then he will probably spiral himself into a panic attack. This is not a situation that can afford to get ignored anymore; he has no idea what to do about it but it’s obvious that something needs to get done, and fast. Time’s working against them now.

He spends most of the morning pacing the hallway cradling his netportal in one arm and clicking through the encrypted folder on his desktop. Most of it he can’t make heads or tails of; a lot of it is just Michael’s development notes, all technical information he has no frame of reference for. But looking at it feels a little bit illicit - he’s not supposed to have this information and even though he can’t understand it, it still gives him a thrill just to look at and feel like he’s undermining some integral part of the Partnership process. While he’s reading through all of the notes that went into the process - and there are a lot of them, almost a gigabyte of graphs and data and other useful-looking scans - his netportal pings and in the top right corner, the e-net notification bounces onscreen for a moment. He doesn’t check the notification. It’s probably a stupid chain letter or something. Ashton doesn’t have time right now for glittery cat .gifs right now. Instead, he continues reading the development notes to try and decipher some of the shadowy bullshit that went into Michael’s inception.

It feels both like the beginning of something and the end of something with this knowledge. He still doesn’t understand exactly why Michael is the way he is, but reading through some of the metrics from his last brain scan before activation explains a lot of his likes and dislikes. Not for the first time Ashton wonders if all Partners have their own unique likes and dislikes locked away, kept dormant by a system that is so obviously flawed in favor of the rich and powerful in a time when the powers that be claim the average person has more freedom than ever before. What kind of freedom, he thinks, demands that he keep personal files on a virtual desktop in an encrypted folder to avoid some shadowy and vaguely menacing government organization.

“You need to relax,” Michael tells him later. It’s maybe early afternoon and they’re sprawled out in the blanket fort like usual and Michael has been patiently assembling a power converter for some old gaming system he had torn apart and modified. “It’s not like someone is going to come swooping in all guns blazing because I fell asleep one time. You don’t even know if it’s going to happen again,” Michael points out. “Anyway, how would they know something like that? Biometric tracking chips seem a little movie-villain sinister.”

“Maybe.” Ashton worries at the inside of his bottom lip. He’s worried that they have implanted Michael with some kind of biometric tracker. Surely if they had, though, BLITS would already know that Michael is defecting and have sent someone over to collect him. It wouldn’t be like BLITS to spend so much time and money on ‘quality control’ just to send their end product out into the world without some way to carefully control the end result. Which makes Ashton question whether the end result is truly to keep their Partners docile and sweet forever, or if it’s to keep the unwitting chumps willing to shell out thousands of credits to avoid the personal sacrifices involved in forming personal relationships in line so that they never question anything. He thinks of Calum, suddenly spending credits he doesn’t have happily because he thinks he’s in love and how that is his only topic of conversation. And he knows this because he’s been watching the scenes of Calum’s life play out in 1080p on a holoscreen for eight hours a day; just because he can’t hear what Calum and the new guy in the mailroom talk about doesn’t mean he hasn’t learned to read lips some.

There’s not enough to substantiate anything actual, but there’s enough to know that Calum is happy in his life and that is perhaps what hurts Ashton most. He had thought they were friends - maybe not good friends, maybe not the kind of friends who spend a lot of time together outside of work - and there is a sense of betrayal in that that has stuck with him in the past weeks. It doesn’t bother him that someone else is happy or carefree. It doesn’t even bother him that it’s Calum. Just… He wishes he could be that, sometimes, that obliviously happy. He wishes he weren’t so painfully aware that they’re living out a lie fabricated by someone else.

Most of all he wishes that every time he laid his head on Michael’s chest, instead of enjoying the moment of closeness he’s counting heartbeats and holding his own breath trying to make sure that each beat comes as precisely as the last one had. He hates that about himself. The same things that make him happy - that make him feel like he’s not the only one in love - also make him sad. And how fucked up is that? he reflects. It’s second nature to him now, these stupid little things he does to make sure they haven’t strayed too far off the beaten path. There’s nothing that should make him feel inherently nervous, yet for some reason he can’t soothe his fraying nerves. Even with Michael next to him he feels on edge. As if something is about to happen.

 

Naturally, of course, it does.

A sound wakes them in the middle of the night. It’s a soft rapping on the front door - the kind that would go unnoticed in a brighter time, maybe - and Ashton almost ignores it. After all, it is the middle of the night. What kind of person in their right mind knocks on somebody’s door in the middle of the night? With that in mind he shifts in Michael’s arms and glances at the time. 0127 in the morning. “Probably a fire drill,” he groans, pulling the hoodie Michael had been wearing over his bare chest. Michael just groans and rolls over, cocooning himself in the blankets. He looks so comfortable that Ashton lets him sleep, figuring that whoever is at the door is there over some small matter - or for that matter drunk - or else there’s some plausible explanation for being woken at such an unreasonable hour. The knocking becomes more insistent the longer it takes him to answer the door. Kind of rude, considering the time of night. Not bothering with the viewhole Ashton unlatches the door and it swishes silently open, silhouetting the two men on the other side in darkness for a second until the lights flicker on.

Quiet horror fills Ashton’s chest as it dawns on him. In front of him are two equally burly men dressed in all black. “Are you the homeowner?” the one on the left asks. Ashton nods, too stunned to speak. He can’t tell one handler from the other - they’re wearing their riot masks, pullover masks made of a sheer reflective fabric to obscure their faces. This has to be a mistake. “Look toward the light, please,” the handler says, and then there’s the bright red flash of the retinal scanner from a palmtab directly in his eyes. He barely has time to blink away the bright spots in his vision before the pair of handlers are shoving past him, knocking things over in their hurry to search Ashton’s quarters with their too-bright lightsticks.

This isn’t happening, Ashton thinks. He’s had this nightmare so many times in the past month that it doesn’t feel real. It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not… But then he hears the thump of heavy-soled boots on the stairs and his body takes over from where his brain has stopped. “What are you doing,” he gasps, breathing hard from his sprint up the stairs to find the handlers in his bedroom - in his goddamn bedroom! - and Michael facedown on the bed while one of the handlers subdues him and the other forces a set of zipcuffs on him. “Stop, what are you doing, you can’t do this,” he pleads. Shoves at the handler holding Michael desperately, repeating the word ‘stop’ over and over again.

The other one grabs him roughly and moves him out of the way, just lifts his entire body by the armpits. “Sir, I’m going to need you to calm down,” the handler tells him.

“You can’t just take him like this in the middle of the night!” Ashton protests, twisting his body to try and break free of the firm grasp on him. He has to get to Michael. He can’t let this happen. But no matter how much he beats at the handler’s chest, his arms, even his face, he can’t get away to stop this from continuing. “Let me go!” he shouts, grabbing at whatever he can grab hold of. Ashton is sure that he’s never been so angry in his life. There has never been another moment as important as this one. He shouts himself hoarse, by the end of it feeling like his throat is full of broken glass.

“I understand that you’re upset, sir, but we’re just doing our jobs. Under section 4.33 subsection A, we’re authorized to seize BLITS-issued property due to a factory defect. You should receive an invoice for services rendered within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. In the meantime, rest assured that we will take the utmost care with your… property,” one of them tells him. Pulls out the palmtab again and has his partner shove Ashton’s thumb onto it. Under the sheer fabric it looks like they’re both sneering, amused at his distress. The van is pulled up right in front of the door. When Ashton kicks his leg out, trying to get any piece of the men taking Michael away, the one that turns to him says, “Sir, if you continue to resist we will have to arrest you for assaulting a government official,” and the mirth in his voice is so evident that Ashton wants to make him hurt.

Michael, who has been eerily silent through the ordeal, looks at him and says, “It’s okay. I’ll go.” And it’s so far from being okay that Ashton wants to scream, again, but there’s Michael calmly walking behind the handler toward the door and there’s nothing that either of them can do to stop it from happening. When the handler taking up the rear tries to push Michael through the door, he turns to Ashton and says, “It’s okay, Ash. I love you. Don’t worry.” Then the handlers grab him from either side and carry him to the van, still and silent, and Ashton has to restrain himself from going out his front door barefoot and running after the van. He knows he would never catch up to it in time. Instead he stands with the door ajar and wonders who the fuck reported on him. They were careful. They were so fucking careful. It doesn’t make any sense. And it can’t have been Calum - he hasn’t spoken to Calum in almost three weeks - so it has to have been someone else, which means that it could have been anyone.

The back of his neck stings where the handler had grabbed him. Out of habit, Ashton rubs his hand over it and finds a patch of skin that feels gummy and cold to the touch. Curiously he peels and peels at it until whatever it is comes away; only when he has it in his hand does he realize that the handler had med-patched him. It’s probably a sedative, he thinks. Though it’s hard to think through the fog that’s slowly descended on him - confirming that whatever patch they had given him was in fact a sedative. He sticks it to the wall and hurries to the bathroom, where he sits on the toilet with a washcloth scrubbing at his neck until the skin feels rubbed raw. It doesn’t matter if it is. He just doesn’t want them drugging him in addition to everything else they’ve done. After his skin is clean he feels slightly better.

Although better is a relative term at the moment, all things considered. He paces through the house to assess the damage. Aside from a couple of framed photos on the walls - and those had been there when he moved in - nothing has been moved. It feels like a wrecking ball got dragged through the place. The bedroom feels like a treacherous place; Ashton can’t bear to be in it so he takes his netportal and charger and sets himself up in the blanket fort. He sits in it and just stares at his screen blankly while the last traces of sedative wear off over time. Time flows by in fits and starts. Ashton couldn’t say how long he sat there, numb. It all feels like a dream in a strange way. Things seem like they’re moving sluggishly and too fast at the same time. He wants Michael back.

Somehow, it manages to surprise him when he reaches up to his face and pulls his fingers away damp with tears. He hadn’t realized he was crying. It makes sense that he would be. All he can think, over and over, is that Michael’s gone. Gone. The word booms in his head like a thunderclap. The net-drama is still paused at the same exact place it had been before he fell asleep. Even though it makes no sense Ashton reasons with himself that if he leaves the drama paused forever, it makes the whole situation real, he can’t bring himself to unpause it. He doesn’t want things to move on without Michael by his side. And he knows that it’s not forever; he knows that this state of loneliness isn’t permanent but things won’t be the same after, either. Every sound makes him jump. He’s sure that they’re going to come back for him, too, zipcuff him and throw him into the back of an identical van and take him away to the same place all criminals are sent to, the same place no one talks about ever.

He knows where people go when they break the law. Everyone knows. It’s never talked about, another of the shadowy and vague parts of society that get ignored or side-eyed at best in favor of the big, shiny distractions that barrage the people from all directions from the moment they’re born. Everyone knows what the glowing pods that ring the city limits are used for. The power grid. Or at least that’s the sanitized, BLITS-ed way of speaking about it. What it is, strictly speaking, is a power generation facility that takes bio-energy from those who are deemed no longer useful to themselves. It’s said that ‘even if their usefulness to the economy has come to an end, this is just the beginning of another way of giving back to the community.’ Ashton winces at how easy it is for the slogans to come back to him. He’s spent the last six years working hard to undo what the education corporations had done during his years at school. It seems that no matter how hard he tries, he’s never going to be able to escape.

Panic and fear have given way to a quiet determination with an undercurrent of furious, burning rage. Once the sedative has completely worn itself out Ashton can think clearly. It’s then that he notices the notification icon hopping in the corner of his netportal, pinging desperately for his attention. He usually ignores his e-net notifications - glittery cat .gifs and all - but for some reason he feels compelled to tap the icon, launching his e-net client for the first time in days. There’s the regular amount of spam scattered throughout his messages but that’s expected no matter when he checks it. No matter how meticulously he sets his spam filters, some of it always manages to trickle through the cracks. So many years this technology has been available and there are still things that haven’t gotten caught and cataloged and restricted until it no longer resembles its original thought. Which is kind of refreshing, in a way, to think that there are things in the world that can trickle through the cracks and avoid detection.

There’s another message from the unknown sender. On the heels of their last message - Ashton checks the timestamp - two days ago, he opens it first before anything else. The body of the message simply says ‘We can help.’ At the bottom there’s an attachment, which he double-taps to open. Pixel by pixel the image loads; it’s just a black bird icon. Ashton doesn’t attach any meaning to it. Maybe it was an accident, he thinks, maybe they selected the wrong attachment and the real file is floating out in cyberspace somewhere. He hasn’t replied to any of the messages before this one. Considering that whoever the sender is had tried to warn him that the handlers were coming for Michael, though, he is going to respond to this one.

‘Who are you?’ he types. He hits return on the keyboard. The message sends instantly; he taps out of it and scrolls through the rest of his messages, hoping for something from his mother or maybe his sister. Anything to chill the fire in his veins and help him to calm down a little bit. He’s not expecting to get another ping so soon after the first message had come.

This one says, ‘Not safe to tell you here. Find us in person to discuss.’ There’s the bird attachment again. This time Ashton recognizes it as intentional. He’s no closer to understanding the significance of the bird, but he assumes that that’s the sign he should be looking for. He doesn’t bother with a response to this message; he figures that whoever the sender is will know his decision as soon as Ashton finds them. Presuming, of course, that he can find them before the law finds a way to take him first. He saves the attachment and sends it to his rarely-used palmtab, sitting in a drawer in the kitchen. What use of it does he have if the only person he ever seriously talks to lives under the same roof? Maybe meeting up with a mysterious person who appears to be watching his every move is a reckless idea, but there’s nothing stopping him from doing it. The worst hurt has already been inflicted. Ashton feels like he has nothing left to lose.

Logically he knows that Michael will come back in a week, maybe two weeks at most. But he knows it won’t be the same, either. They’ll put Michael into another one of those tubes and re-condition his brain until everything special about him has been sucked out and replaced with someone Ashton doesn’t recognize. He feels a little like he’s being punished for finding love in a place where it’s being eradicated. People can pretend all they want that that’s not what’s happening. Ashton can’t think of a single person he knows in New Sydney who genuinely loves anyone in their life - Calum included - and that scares him. Not as much as being without Michael scares him, but it’s frightening nonetheless that something that feels so natural is being treated like some kind of disease or defect.

For a very long time Ashton sits in the blanket fort searching everything he can think of to do with birds - what type of bird the symbol might be, where it originated from - but the later it gets the more tired he gets and eventually he runs out of safe searches. The last thing he needs is to get arrested on the heels of Michael being taken for recalibration. Eventually, he has to admit defeat and curls up right there in the blanket fort until he falls asleep. Before he sleeps he makes sure to sign himself into work as ill again. Groggily he wonders if that might be the reason he got reported on, if Armstrong suspected all along that there was something wrong with Michael. He’s too tired to be suspicious, though. Sleep overtakes him and he suffers restless nightmares. It’s not the first time he’ll have them in the coming days.

 

  


Ashton looks for birds everywhere he goes, at first. Life without Michael takes on something of a rhythm - he gets up the second time his alarm goes off, puts himself through the motions of going to work and avoids Calum at all costs, then goes home and repeats the actions over again - and he’s starting to fall into the trap of it when something happens to pull him out. He’s almost forgotten why he’s looking for the bird. It’s lost all meaning in the greater scheme of trying to keep his head above water. Things are getting so bad that Ashton is seriously considering going to the med-fac to get some uppers. He’s losing count of the days without Michael. It feels impossible; he knows that Michael is gone and that he’s upset about it, but under the weight of everything else threatening to crush him he’s having difficulty keeping the days straight since they tend to bleed into each other with the monotony of it all. It has gotten to the point where the only thing he knows is the pain of being without Michael.

And he’s trying not to think about it on the mag-train on the eve of his weekend, squinting at the adverts playing on the opaque surface of the windows but not really absorbing the information. He gets off at his platform and makes his way home, accompanied as usual by a fleet of lightpods knocking into each other until they thin out around the corner across from his street. The invoice for services rendered had shown up in his e-net as promised by the handler; Ashton had sighed and paid it, having no way to contest the charges. He has a nasty feeling anyway that even if he could find a way to dispute it the end of that road would be a flash-forward to him being lowered into one of the sickly red pods and sealed in, left there until the walls of the pod begin to glow softly. The contents of those pods never change. There’s no metamorphosis into something better than that, only more of the same humdrum propaganda pumped into their brains until they finally begin to rot. Ashton thinks about that as he walks, a little slower than usual.

There’s a sound off in the distance somewhere, maybe a hundred yards ahead. He freezes in place - he’s still a little jumpy with any unexpected movements or sounds - and the lightpods following him crash into the back of him like lemmings. Nothing jumps out at him. “That was weird,” he comments to himself aloud, partly to ward off anything that might be lurking within hearing distance. Of course he’s not expecting a response back, and he doesn’t get one. He continues walking a little faster than he had before until he reaches his front door and thumbs the lock open automatically. The door swishes open the same way it always does. Nothing is out of place; everything inside his quarters is the same way he had left it, but for the first time since the handlers had come for Michael it starts to bother him that everything is exactly the same. Until now he’s barely had the energy to open the refrigerator and shove some leftover pizza in his mouth, maybe get halfway through a can of beer before he collapses in his bed feeling exhausted.

He takes advantage of the sudden burst of energy to cook himself a ready to eat meal. Admittedly, it only takes thirty seconds to heat up - all he has to do is tear off a corner of the shiny package and add some water before he shakes it up - but it’s more than he’s felt able to do in days. It takes him very little time to scarf down the whole thing; he considers making himself another but he’s eaten so little this week that he’s not sure he can stomach it. He’s standing in the middle of the kitchen thinking about it when the knock at the door comes.

He nearly jumps out of his skin - and for a second he swears he could feel his soul start to leave his body - but then whoever’s at the door knocks a second time. The knock doesn’t change in intensity. This time Ashton is more cautious in answering the door. He bends to peer through the viewhole before opening the door. It’s Luke, though. The breath Ashton hadn’t known he was holding whooshes out of him as he opens the door. It takes a moment to register that Calum isn’t with Luke. It’s so improbable that he doesn’t actually believe it’s happening. Maybe he’s finally snapped. Maybe he’s having a psychotic break and he’s standing in his empty doorway still on the night that they took Michael, staring into the darkness. What possible explanation could there be for Luke standing on his doorstep dressed in street clothes with a backpack slung over one shoulder?

“Hey,” Ashton says. “What’s happened? Did something happen to Calum?”

Luke pushes past him into the house. “Lock the door,” he says, eyes darting back and forth to survey Ashton’s quarters. Ashton asks about Calum again and this time it’s obvious that Luke is ignoring his questions. He stands in the front hallway wringing his hands while Luke goes around closing the drapes and checking the locks on all the windows. When he comes back his face is anything but the blank, placid stare Ashton is accustomed to. “Are we alone?” Luke demands to know.

Ashton goes, “What,” and looks from the closed drapes to Luke and back again. He’s still got a ready to eat meal in one hand. He had been about to make it when Luke knocked on the door. Now he doesn’t know what to do. There’s a cognitive disconnect between the Luke he remembers and the Luke standing in front of him. Then Luke asks if they’re alone again and he says, “Yeah. We’re alone,” and it creates a lump in his throat. He tries his best not to think about it.

“I’ve left Calum,” Luke says. Ashton says ‘what’ again - he’s not sure if the sound leaves his mouth or if his lips move wordlessly - and Luke says, “Yeah. I’m really sorry, I didn’t know where else I could go and I thought you would understand -” and then he pauses. Something registers in his expression. “Wait,” he says. “Where’s Michael?”

And much like Luke had done a moment prior Ashton ignores the question. “You can’t just leave,” he points out. “I mean, it’s good that you’re here instead of out on the street where you could get picked up by handlers, but what are you going to do now?” Instead of being focused on Michael being gone - which is the only thing he’s been able to think about or not-think about, he realizes, in almost a week - now he’s filled with concern for his friend’s Partner. Well, ex-friend, but the leftover sentiment is still in his chest. It sticks there sometimes and he’s not the type to hide away his emotions. He looks at Luke again, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and decides that he can’t very well turn Luke away in his time of need. It’s what he would want someone else to do if the situation were reversed. Instead of pushing with further questions, he takes Luke’s bag and says, “Well, come on in. Are you hungry?”

“I’m - Are you sure?” Luke stammers. Clearly he hadn’t been expecting much help, then.

“They came for Michael in the night,” Ashton sighs. “Of course I’m sure. You can sleep in his room if you want. It’s not much, but the door locks so you’ll have some privacy.” Luke’s eyes go wide and Ashton wonders if he’s ever had a speck of privacy in his short life. He drops the backpack at the mouth of the blanket fort. After that he busies himself with ordering pizza - a necessity, he tells himself, since he hasn’t the energy to cook something proper at the moment - and then with finding spare toiletries in the bathroom for Luke, who doesn’t have any of his own. It’s good to have something to do with the bits of restless energy that have been building up inside of him. Luke doesn’t comment on the fact that Michael’s room is the laundry room. He looks tired and grateful as hell to have somewhere, even if it’s small and cramped and kind of messy.

Slowly Ashton coaxes the story out of him over pizza and beers. It turns out that Luke is a very good listener and doesn’t interject with unwanted commentary like most people would. At the end of it all, he squeezes Ashton’s forearm and says, “I’m sorry.” Then he cracks the top of another beer and hands it to Ashton solemnly before clinking the cans together in a gesture of solidarity. “Thank you, though. For letting me stay here. I didn’t know where else to go. I just… couldn’t take it anymore.” Luke stares down at his own hands for a moment before he seems to shake himself out of whatever mood had come over him and he takes a long drink from his beer.

Ashton doesn’t ask him why he’s left Calum. It seems disrespectful to ask - and he’s not about to go picking at someone else’s fresh wounds when he has some of his own. He puts on a holo instead, old episodes of ‘Elevator Music’ on a loop, and that seems to be enough for them to fall into a companionable silence on his couch for a while. During one of the adverts Ashton finally cracks a little in his facade of everything’s-fine and says, “I loved him, you know.”

Luke nods. “I know. I didn’t love Calum,” and that’s all he says about it. He shifts uneasily on the couch and adds, “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.” ‘Elevator Music’ starts back up and Ashton half-watches it, thinking. For now he’s glad for the company. They’re not friends - he wouldn’t consider what unfolds over the next couple of days friendship, exactly - but it’s something close to that. And Ashton knows that for him it’s filling in a gap left wide-open by what had happened. It feels shitty to think about. That first night he and Luke stay up late talking over the adverts of the reality feed on the holo network. Not about anything important, simply talking to pass the time. For the first time in what must be days the fog clouding Ashton’s judgment starts to lift and he starts feeling not so hopeless.

He still misses Michael, of course. During a particularly boring block of ‘Elevator Music’ - and there’s only so much of it back-to-back he can take, honestly - he goes to the laundry room and retrieves one of Michael’s tablets. “Um,” Ashton says awkwardly. “If there’s anything you need, this is jailbroken so you can access pretty much anything I have permissions for on the global servers. Feel free to use my credits, too. Fuck knows I don’t need them.” He’s suddenly embarrassed by the amount of credit in his account, even after paying the service fee for Michael’s recalibration. Luke must have seen Calum’s finances; he’ll know how much more Ashton is getting from this promotion than he had let on when they had been over last. He wonders how much Luke knows - how long he’s been defective for - but can’t find it in himself to ask. The fumbling gesture makes Luke smile, the first genuine smile Ashton has seen from him. After the block of ‘Elevator Music’ is over an episode from the first season of ‘Recollection’ comes on.

“It’s a lot like that, you know,” Luke says abruptly. When Ashton looks over at him, confused, he shrugs and elaborates. “What they do to you inside the tubes,” he explains. “It’s like… You don’t remember all of it exactly, but after a while bits and pieces start to come to the surface and you’re supposed to repress all of it. But some of it trickles through the cracks and one day you’re suddenly, like, aware? Not completely aware. Just enough that you know you’re being treated like you’re less than everybody else and you’re not supposed to know that there’s anything better than this. And it sucks. You can’t tell anyone or they’ll come in and take what little of yourself you actually have and… throw it away.” The glumness in his tone gives Ashton a good idea of exactly how unappealing that option sounds. It makes the wound a little deeper, now, that Michael would willingly sacrifice that much of himself to keep Ashton safe.

No wonder Johnson and Sam go on the run, he thinks to himself. Watching ‘Recollection’ makes something in his brain click. It’s a small thing - it’s such a small thing, small enough to go unnoticed on a show with episodes produced so quickly - that he almost doesn’t notice. In one of the scenes where Sam talks about leaving the City there’s a bird symbol graffitied on a wall in the background. It might not even be the same symbol. But it’s there and Ashton flicks his fingers in the holo-glove, freezing the frame and enlarging it so he can look at the symbol properly. “I think I have an idea that might help you,” Ashton says slowly, realization dawning on him. He rushes upstairs for his netportal and opens up his e-net, which he’s been dutifully ignoring, to show Luke the strange messages. “Look at this,” he says, opening up the attachment on the last two messages from the unknown sender.

Luke regards the image files suspiciously. “You don’t even know if that’s the same symbol. It could be… a trap, or something.” And maybe he’s right. Now that they’re looking at the two images side by side, Ashton’s almost certain that the similarity was put there on purpose. Or maybe it was pulled directly from the show - a symbol so innocuous that the average viewer would never think twice about it, just some common graffiti - and it’s a scavenger hunt to get to the prize at the end. The prize being liberation for Partners, obviously. It goes with the message of the show, which is so counter-revolutionary that it’s almost brilliant. The thing is that Ashton can’t think of anyone who would have their eye on him or pick him for a rebel of any sort. He’s always been so careful to toe the line. There are enough strikes against him simply by virtue of existing that he can’t afford to fuck up. He chooses not to think about that.

“If it was a trap, wouldn’t they want to leave a paper trail that they could use as evidence against us?” He taps the screen, pulling up the message that had argued against providing information about the sender.

“I’ve seen graffiti like that somewhere,” Luke tells him, head cocked to the side as he tries to remember where.

Ashton bites his lip. He can’t believe what he’s considering. “I could go looking,” he suggests. “You can’t come with me, for obvious reasons, but if you can remember where you might have seen it I can try to find it. Maybe we can find them, find out what they have to say. I’ve got nothing to lose at this point,” he adds grimly. According to his e-net, Michael’s not due back until next week, which makes this the perfect time to do something stupid and possibly illegal. In the back of his head he can practically hear Michael’s blatant disapproval. Well, Michael’s not here at the moment and Luke looks so cautiously hopeful that Ashton has to do it. In the morning, though. First he needs to sleep the first restful hours he’ll have had in a week.

By morning he’s gotten used to the idea of Luke staying for a while, flaws and all. When he finally drags himself to the kitchen Luke’s already cooking breakfast, pushing what smells suspiciously like bacon around in the frying pan. “I can’t in good conscience let you go on a wild goose chase with an empty stomach. Also, I was hungry,” he explains. Ashton has no complaints; he’s so used to leftover pizza and the occasional pot of ramen noodles that a breakfast like this is a luxury. Despite how shittily he’s been eating he manages to wolf down two stacks of fluffy, golden pancakes and more bacon than he probably needs. Luke does the washing-up by hand afterward even though he could just as easily have put them into the dish machine. Ashton points this out and he goes, “I like doing them this way. Gives me some time by myself to think,” and then he’s blinking like it’s suddenly dawned on him that he doesn’t need to look for excuses to be alone anymore, that he can just be alone if he wants to be.

He hovers while Ashton considers what types of item he may need on his exploratory mission. And Ashton doesn’t mind; he knows from experience that the BLITS conditioning takes a while to really shake off. “It’s okay,” Ashton says when Luke apologizes for the thousandth time. “Pass me that, would you,” he goes, waving his hand vaguely in the direction of his palmtab which has been largely ignored in the past months. When it comes to life the notifications center is woefully empty; Ashton is sure he should call his mother more often but he can’t actually bring himself to care. He hasn’t seen her in years, anyway, so what good would it do?

Luke follows him as far as the door and stands just inside it, watching him go. “Be safe,” Luke tells him as the door swishes shut behind him. The lock falls into place with a satisfying click and Ashton sets out in search of the bird symbol. He doesn’t find anything the first day, riding the mag-trains back and forth as many times as he can get a seat in the conductor’s car. The conductor’s car is the only one with transparent glass windows; for safety reasons it’s a requirement since, obviously, the conductor needs to be able to see the path ahead of the mag-train at all times in case of emergency.

 

On the second day Ashton almost misses it. He’s sitting in the conductor’s car on the mag-train again, staring straight ahead because at this point he’s looked at just about everything there is to look at. The only reason he sees it at all is because he turns his head to scratch his neck right below the ear, thus having to look out the window at an angle he hadn’t been before, and there it is. Casually - he doesn’t want to call any attention to himself - he jabs the button for the next stop and makes his way back to the train doors. It’s Sunday, so the train is not particularly crowded. He has an easy time getting off at the platform, although he does have to admit that he has no idea where he is. He’s been riding the mags for so long that he has only the barest idea of what sector he’s in, let alone what stop he’s gotten off the train at. Sighing, he pulls out the palmtab that Luke had insisted he bring despite his arguments that it had been of absolutely no use so far and that he doesn’t want anyone tracking his movements, glad for it now that he’s found a lead to follow.

Before he does anything else with it Ashton switches on the net-nanny mode. It’s not as safe as taking his palmtab off the grid entirely would be, but that level of hacking is beyond his experience so the net-nanny will have to do. He opens the camera and snaps a picture of the platform he’d gotten off at and the landmark nearest the bird graffitied on a wall behind the housing development. They must have a stencil, he figures, to do the bird so neatly. There are no rough edges or smudges to it, suggesting that the paint had been laid recently. Older graffiti would have been faded over time. Ashton takes it as a sign and starts off in the direction opposite the mag-train platform. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for quite yet. He figures he’ll know when he sees it. The first thing that becomes evident as he walks is that he’s ended up in kind of a slummy part of the city. The buildings are a bit older, not as well-maintained as the developments in his own sector. In the background there is a low but constant din of machinery; he thinks he must be near the industrial sector, maybe on the edges of it.

Ashton has almost given up hope of finding another of the birds, wondering if it might be a fluke, when he sees the second one. It’s above a storm drain, painted right onto the sidewalk alongside the pink and orange lines demarcating where the power lines and the water mains have been laid. On a hunch, he walks in the direction the bird is pointing toward. It’s really one of those blink-and-you-miss-it signs. He walks until the street connects to a main road with businesses scattered amongst the old, dilapidated dwellings. The next bird is easier to find; it’s painted on the side of a mailbox, streaky and faded like it was done in a hurry and the graffiti artist got interrupted. Ashton doesn’t want to find out what happened to that guy. And with luck, he won’t. The one after that is harder to find, spray-painted onto the slats of an old wooden fence bordering an alleyway that appears to lead nowhere. This one might be the oldest of all the signs he’s seen so far, barely visible against the greying wood bleached from the sun.

Either he’s going to find the answers he seeks at the end of this alleyway - and redemption - or there are handlers waiting to arrest him. Steadying himself, Ashton looks over his shoulder before stepping into the alley and walks quickly until he’s pretty sure he’s out of view from the street. There’s nothing between the fence and the brick wall. It’s a pretty narrow alley, too, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side. His stomach drops nervously at the thought of it. That can only mean one thing.

He could turn back right now and say he never saw anything.

He could do that, and he could send Luke out into the night without so much as another word. But he won’t do that; even thinking about it brings to mind Michael’s look of stern disappointment whenever he fucks something up, and he can’t bear the thought of fucking this up. There might not be any hope for Michael and Ashton’s trying not to dwell on that. But to deny Luke a chance at something better than quiet subservience for the rest of his life would be cruel. It’s not out of any sort of loyalty to Calum. Ashton is pretty sure that they’ll never be friends again at this point. No, he’s doing it out of loyalty to Luke, who played his part and sat quietly and watched out of the corner of his eye and said nothing. Maybe he recognizes some part of himself in Luke. Maybe he’s trying to save the parts of himself-in-Luke that he couldn’t save the first time around. The other thing is that he doesn’t think he can handle losing another person he cares about like that.

So he squares his shoulders, trying to fake the confidence he needs before marching brazenly into a wolves’ den. “Here goes nothing,” he tells himself, and it’s true. What is there to lose that he hasn’t already lost? He stands from where he had stopped and crouched, made himself as small as possible while he thought about it and made his decision. The alley is not a pretty place; the building next to it is squat and run-down, leaking fluid into the alley in great big oily puddles. It might have been an auto repair shop at one point, before the Crash and the resulting fuel shortage rendered combustion engine vehicles totally useless.

The building at the end of the path has windows boarded up with plywood - actual plywood, not plexiglass or even pulpwood - and Ashton doesn’t think anyone is inside. He’s about to turn it around and call it quits when he hears a quite deliberate cough from within the building.

He just hopes there isn’t a secret knock or something, because no one told him about that. Hesitantly, he knocks on the door. There are bars on the dirty little window looking in, making it look like the absolute last place anyone would ever want to be. Which is what makes it perfect, actually, to house an illegal organization. Hopefully the type of organization interested in helping runaway Partners to escape the city. Finally - after what seems like forever - the door opens a crack and Ashton can just make out a sliver of a man’s face on the other side.

“What’s the password, eh?” the man says.

Ashton swears loudly and answers, “No one ever told me about a password. The message just said to find my way here. Well, not even here,” Ashton amends. “You - I mean, whoever sent me the message - said I needed to find them for answers.”

The door snaps shut. The hunt is over, cut short by Ashton’s own ineptitude. On the other side of the door he can hear a series of clicks followed by one louder click. Under his breath Ashton mutters, ‘Please don’t be a gun, please don’t have a gun,’ and then the door swings open unhindered by the numerous locks lining it. “Come on in, then,” the man tells him, jerking his head toward the interior of the building. Once inside Ashton realizes that the walls are lined with soundproofing material. To the outside world it’s just another run-down building in one of the most run-down areas of New Sydney, the kind of joint no one would look twice about. Inside it’s all dim lights and air hazy with smoke. It’s the kind of place Ashton has only ever seen in net-dramas and pre-Crash films. “You know who you’re lookin’ for, boy?”

He scans the room through the plumes of smoke, searching for a familiar face. The sender has been very cloak and dagger up until this point. Ashton feels safe in his wildly unfounded guess that he wants the booth in the back corner, farthest from the door. “I think I’m good,” he tells the old man, who promptly goes back to the bar to pour himself a glass of scotch and take up his fat cigar with the tip still smoldering brightly. He approaches slowly, heart pounding in his chest. This could be the worst decision he’s made in his entire life. Either his hunch is going to be very, very right and he’s going to get the help he needs - or things could go the opposite way and men in riot masks and black clothing could jump out at him and stun-gun him.

“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t come,” a familiar voice says from across the booth when he slides onto the sticky vinyl seat. Ashton blinks, eyes adjusting to the dim lighting. Across the table is sitting about the last person he would ever expect to be tangled up in this madness. Dawson grins and says, “Feldy owes me so many credits for this, dude, you have no idea,” and Ashton has no idea how to process that information. A glass of… something… has materialized in front of him without his noticing. He swirls the liquid in the glass suspiciously and then Dawson adds, “First round’s on me.”

“What is this place?” Ashton asks. He sips at the dark liquid uncertainly. It’s delicious; it’s smooth and tastes of black licorice, sickly-sweet on his tongue.

Dawson says, “It doesn’t exist.” After a beat, he laughs and shakes his head. “We help people who are unhappy with the way the system currently works. It’s kind of a Robin Hood thing - you know, steal from the rich, give to the poor, that whole deal? So we have people inside the system who help us do the rest of our… services.” The meaning is heavily implied by the words as well as the expression Dawson gives off. Ashton swirls his drink again, wondering what it is that he could possibly have to offer a shadowy and vaguely menacing organization like that. Well, as organized as - can they be considered a crime ring? - organized criminals can be, anyway.

He finishes the sweet licorice-tasting drink before saying anything more. “Um, what if one wished to… procure the aforementioned services?” And, okay, maybe he is slightly less badass than he’s been envisioning himself throughout the course of this endeavor. Less Johnson and more… well, one of the hapless proletariat that get three lines in an episode and then promptly die to illustrate the fearsome and far-reaching powers of handlers and the BLITS system.

“You’d have to do a favor, probably. Nothing too big - maybe moving some files, maybe uploading a virus to any vital servers you have permissions to. It really depends on what you’re asking for,” Dawson says. “But let’s not beat around the bush here. This is about Michael, yeah?”

Ashton shakes his head. “No. Um. He’s - They,” he stammers out nervously. “They’ve already taken him for recalibration and I kind of don’t want to mess things up with that? In case he comes out of it on his own. I’m… Is it safe to talk here?” he asks. He’s suddenly paranoid about being overheard, watched, anything that could lead back to him in some way. The last thing he wants is to be arrested and taken in the middle of the night so soon after Michael is supposed to come home. Dawson nods at him like he’s supposed to continue. He does. With his hands spread wide on the tabletop, palms down, he goes, “So my old friend Calum’s Partner showed up on my doorstep a couple of nights ago and said that he left Calum. He wants to leave the city. I was… hoping you’d be able to help us do that, honestly.” He’s brimming with hope - both for Luke’s sake and his own - and he’s pretty sure it shines through.

“That’s… going to require a bit more work. It may take some time. Um. You can call me Rian now, too; we should probably drop the formalities if we’re going to work together. John - Feldy - he says it helps to humanize us. Anyway, give me a couple of days and I’ll see what I can find out. In the meantime, ask your friend if he has any idea what he’d like to do after he gets out. Once we know that it makes it a lot easier to place him.” The old man brings them another round of drinks. Ashton expects him to bring a scanner by for payment. He’s confused when Dawson - no, Rian - pushes a data chip across the table and the old man snatches it up.

The old man explains, “We operate on the barter system here. Completely off the grid,” and then he gives a hearty chuckle like he’s expecting Ashton to figure out an appropriate method of payment on his own. Which is completely the opposite of helpful, since the only things he’s got other than his credit chip are the contents of his pockets, which amount to just about a grand total of nothing. He pulls everything out anyway and spreads it out on the table. The only thing of any value is the tarnished silver coin he carries in his pockets sometimes for good luck, an old relic his mother had given him as a child that he’s held onto this whole time. It’s a small coin that says it’s only worth five cents, which is not even a fraction of a single credit. The old man plucks it up off the table and looks at it critically before pocketing it. “That’s a keepsake, that is,” he says knowingly.

“I guess that’s that, then.” Ashton wishes he didn’t feel slightly wistful over the dumb thing. “How should I get in contact with you?”

Rian just smiles at him. “I’ll contact you. You’ll know when it happens. Until then, sit tight and look out for your friend. I’ll do what I can for Michael. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.” And with a wink Rian slides out of the booth, leaving behind another data chip in his stead. Ashton finishes his drink before leaving himself, not wanting to waste a drink that had cost him something that used to be so precious. It feels a bit like his wishes have all been used up, and he doesn’t know when he’ll get another one.

 

It takes Luke some time to decide what he wants to do. In the meantime he’s practically glued to the tablet, finding out as much as he can about the other cities in New Australia and considering whether he’d like to go to any of them. He also considers leaving the cities entirely and living off the grid. Ashton goes to work and waits for a sign from Rian - or from anyone, really. Anyone other than his mother sending him more chain mail and the constant barrage of adverts from BLITS. Life goes on, and for the moment all Luke and Ashton can do is wait for something to happen. It’s easier than either of them expected.

Michael comes home on a Tuesday. That is in and of itself a huge distraction. Ashton sees the van pull up to the curb as he’s climbing the stairs to his quarters and something hopeful springs up in his chest. He thumbs the door unlocked and goes inside, making as much noise as possible to alert Luke to the possibility of handlers coming inside. Kicks his shoes off noisily and dumps them in the corner, dropping each boot individually to hear its dull thud. “You’d better hide,” he tells Luke as he rounds the corner into the main living quarters. “And turn that off. I’m supposed to have just gotten home.” Ashton flicks the holo projector off. He’ll just have to hope that it cools down enough by the time the handlers come inside to be believable. “Go,” he hisses when Luke stands in the middle of the room waffling about it.

“I’ll just,” Luke says, shuffling off toward the laundry room. Ashton wants to follow and make sure he locks the door behind him, but there’s no time for that. Hearing the door click shut will have to be good enough for him. Luke’s smart though; he’ll figure something out.

The handlers’ boots are heavy on the steps. Ashton’s heart thumps along with them all the way up to the door. Even knowing that it’s coming he has a moment of intense panic at the knock on the door; he has mere seconds to calm himself down so that he doesn’t give any reason to raise their suspicions. He counts to ten in his head before approaching the front door and opening it. The door glides along its tracks soundlessly, revealing two handlers on the front stoop. One of them Ashton recognizes as Beckett. It’s Beckett who pulls out the palmtab and says, “Fancy seeing you again, comrade.” The other handler - an equally tall guy with sharp features and messy hair - pulls a face and elbows Beckett. “Not now,” Beckett growls. “You’ll have to excuse my partner. They normally keep him on a pretty short leash,” he says, and the words are so obviously sharpened and directed at his partner that Ashton knows there’s a story there. No one throws that kind of vitriol at their coworker without good reason. The thing is, everyone has a story. Knowing it doesn’t help humanize them anymore - not when their job is something like this, something that hurts so many people.

“We’ll just need to do a brief inspection before we bring your Partner in. Make sure there are no property standards violations, hazards, that type of thing,” Beckett’s partner says airily. He glances around the main living quarters and inclines his head slightly. Beckett ticks off one of his checkboxes and they move on to the next room. And the dishes are undone in the kitchen; Ashton wants to apologize for them, rush to put them into the dish machine, but neither handler says anything. “I’m Saporta, by the way.” The way he cocks his hip out as he straightens a picture frame is outrageous, flirtatious. He’s trying to illicit a response that he’s not going to get.

“Would you stop,” Beckett hisses. He gets down on his hands and knees in the bedroom to peer under the bed and shine a light around. Checking for contraband, probably. Luckily for Ashton the only things under his bed are the unfortunate shirts that get kicked aside in the morning as he dresses for work and maybe an orphaned sock or two. He’s still paranoid about what kinds of dust bunny could be lurking down there after his first encounter with his handler. Amazingly Beckett does not say anything about the mess in his room. He simply smirks for a second before tapping off the next item on his checklist, methodically working his way through Ashton’s space until the only room left to look at is the laundry room.

Saporta gets to it first. “What’s in here,” he says, “Laundry?” He flips the lock on the doorknob more slowly than necessary. Ashton nods; he can’t say anything, his heart is in his throat and it feels like he’s vibrating with nerves. He says a silent prayer to every god that might exists that Saporta leaves it at that, but of course the taller man doesn’t. Saporta pushes the door open all the way to look around critically, pushing the piles of dirty clothes around with the toe of his boot. “Looks good,” he tells Beckett with a sigh. “Print him and then we can bring the Partner in.” He closes the door behind him and flips the lock, throwing a wink Ashton’s way as soon as Beckett’s back is turned. It’s one of those indecipherable gestures that Ashton feels he’s reading far too much into. These days he is never sure if he’s reading too much into things. He could be paranoid, or he could be right. But those thoughts are quickly overshadowed by the joy bursting in his chest about the fact that Michael’s home.

Ashton gladly presses his thumb down on the palmtab and waits for the chime to confirm that his print has registered. He’s sure that there will be another surcharge for this; he wonders if it will be a service charge or a delivery fee when it appears in his account three days from now. “Wait here,” Beckett tells him. “We’ll be right back.”

The two handlers go to their van. Curious, Ashton watches from the window. He’s never seen someone brought back from BLITS before, only ever taken away. It takes both men to open the back doors of the armored vehicle - another holdover from the early days post-Crash. At first all he can see is the handlers’ backs, the dull shine of their heavy vests in the afternoon sun. It seems like it takes an eternity for them to disappear into the back of the van. It had all seemed so fast when they were pushing Michael into the back of another, similar van - it might even have been the same one - but now every second lasts forever. Finally they reemerge from the guts of the vehicle and for a minute Ashton’s heart stops. Everything stops when one of the handlers knocks on the door to be let back in and he goes; he doesn’t remember opening the door. “Oh my god,” he says, swiping across his eyes with the back of his hand self-consciously. “Thank you.” And that’s a sentence he never thought he’d say to a handler. He can’t bring himself to care. He stands back and watches as they cut through the zipcuffs on Michael’s wrists, aching to touch and hold and make sure that Michael’s okay - actually okay, actually whole, actually himself.

It’s a strange reunion. “We’ll leave you to it,” Beckett says curtly, dragging his partner by the elbow toward the front door.

“Stop being such a sourpuss,” Saporta grouses. He mutters something in what Ashton thinks is Spanish under his breath and shoots Beckett a bitchy look. “Why do you always have to be such a bitch, mijo?” he asks as Beckett seizes him by the wrist to pull him down the stairs. He carries on the whole time they’re walking back to the van. By the time the door has swished shut and the lock has clicked into place, Ashton has stopped caring.

“You’re home,” Ashton says. He wraps his arms around Michael and hugs him hard, all of the stress and frustration of the past nearly two weeks melting out of him at the first contact between them. It feels like a weight has been lifted from his shoulders. Michael’s arms close around him hesitantly. The action is enough to bring Ashton out of his euphoria and crashing back into reality. “Hey,” he says, “We need to talk. A lot has happened while you’ve been gone.”

Michael blinks at him. Goes, “What are you talking about?” and proceeds to straighten the picture frames in the front hallway until they’re at a perfect ninety degree angle. He bends down and straightens out the shoes on the mat, doesn’t even blink at the extra pair of shoes that are obviously not Ashton’s. Just lines them up perpendicular to each other and hangs Ashton’s bag up on the hook. Ashton doesn’t know what to do besides trail after him, horrified. Instead of heading toward the laundry room as expected, Michael makes a beeline for the kitchen and immediately begins rummaging in the cupboards. Back to your regularly scheduled broadcasting, Ashton thinks miserably. And he doesn’t know why he’s surprised, why he had held out hope that Rian or anyone else could have helped Michael by the time BLITS got to him. It stings.

He doesn’t know what comes over him just then. “Stop,” he snaps. “You don’t need to be doing that right now.” Michael freezes mid-action, bent over looking for something in one of the drawers that Ashton barely uses. It occurs to him then that he could ask anything of Michael and he would have to do it. Somehow that thought hadn’t hit home with him before. “What’s wrong with you?” he says.

“Are you unhappy with my performance?” Michael asks in that creepy flat monotone he had had when Ashton first brought him home. His expression is blank; he’s looking right at Ashton but there’s nothing behind his eyes, no emotion or even concern for his own well-being.

Ashton grits his teeth and walks around the counter island to put some space between them. He’s afraid of what will happen if he doesn’t. He just got Michael back, so of course he’s not going to agree and say that yes, he is frustrated with Michael’s behavior. Because that would perpetuate the cycle even more and he’s tired - he is so, so goddamn tired - of being a part of the problem. The words don’t come to him easily. He’s still thinking of what to say when Luke emerges from the laundry room, somewhat rumples but otherwise no worse for wear.

“Where did you go?” Ashton asks him. He’s been wondering ever since Saporta peered into the laundry room. The tall handler hadn’t registered even a seconds’ worth of surprise on his face, so Luke must have been well-hidden or else his presence was expected somehow. But if that were true then Ashton would have been apprehended on the spot, arrested and taken directly to central processing or the decriminalization unit. None of that happened, though.

Luke grimaces. “Climbed into the dryer when I heard footsteps coming. I didn’t know what else to do. You know, it’s dark in there, I wouldn’t advise trying it out ever.” He glances at Michael and adds, “Glad you’re back, man. It’s good to see you in one piece.”

He misses Ashton’s desperate shushing gestures. Michael stares blankly at Luke for a minute and goes, “Are you excelling at your work?” Luke frowns at him.

“Right,” Ashton says, quickly jumping in to cover both of their asses. It wouldn’t be beyond Michael to report them both, especially fresh from an extended session full of BLITS’s bullshit. “Luke is going to be staying here while Calum is out of town.” Michael doesn’t ask why Luke didn’t go with Calum. If he were in his right mind he would’ve asked. And he leaves it at that; if Michael wants to ask questions later, fine, but right now Ashton is painfully aware of what a close call they’ve just had. He lets Michael make dinner - even though it would be much better if Luke did it instead - and he stomachs the burnt food grudgingly. Luke does the washing-up and he hangs back in the kitchen to talk while Michael does laundry. It’s probably a good thing that he’s back; there’s about a week’s worth of clothes that need to be washed because Ashton hasn’t felt like doing much of anything.

“How are you holding up?” Luke asks, placing a soapy hand on Ashton’s shoulder. The small act of kindness warms Ashton’s heart a bit. It’s not enough to totally melt the frosty veneer he’s been building up, but it helps. “Maybe he’ll get better over time. That’s what happened before, isn’t it?” And maybe he’s right. Maybe this is a temporary situation. He wonders how it can be that he’s hopeless and hopeful all at the same time.

He says, “I don’t know what I expected to happen. It’s BLITS,” and he sighs, looks down at his hands splayed across the countertop. At least they’ve got kind of a plan to get Luke out of the city somewhere in the foreseeable future. Hopefully. The more he thinks about it the more it seems like a bad plan; he hasn’t heard anything in a couple of days and he’s not entirely convinced yet that this is not going to implode on him. Anyone could be a double agent. That’s the most dangerous part of living like this. He can’t trust anyone completely. He can’t even trust himself.

He goes to bed early that night, hopes resting in his chest like a deflating balloon. He had been so hopeful. Had let himself get that way even though he knew it was impossible. The sheets have been washed when he crawls into bed. They’re still warm from the dryer - something that used to be such an enjoyable experience for him, now reduced to a feeling of sadness and regret because the sheets no longer smell like Michael. There’s nothing left of what they had to cling to; Ashton crawls under the blankets and curls into a ball, stares at the wall until his eyelids feel like sandpaper. In the morning he feels like hell warmed over, but at least there’s coffee waiting on the counter when he goes downstairs to face the day. It’s little consolation when he could have something real - when he should have something real, and solid. Out of habit he goes to hug Michael on sight. His body doesn’t remember anything that has happened. He’s operating on autopilot, disappointed when the gesture is not reciprocated.

“Good morning,” he says groggily, trying to nuzzle his face into Michael’s neck. Michael turns away stiffly. This is not going well, he thinks bitterly. And it’s the little things that turn his stomach, like how Michael doesn’t smell the same anymore. He’s so angry. They took everything from him. They took his personality, his smile, his laugh, even the way he smells. It doesn’t appeal to him anymore; it doesn’t make him want to get closer to Michael or cuddle up to him. The new scent is something too-sweet and artificial, leaving behind a metallic undertone. Ashton hates it.

Luke comes into the kitchen soon afterward, damp from the shower. He looks at Michael and Ashton standing arms’ length from each other. “I’m just gonna give you guys some privacy,” he says, clattering around the kitchen loudly to get himself a cup of coffee before retreating to the laundry room. He shoots Ashton an apologetic look as he goes. The coffee slops over the edges of his mug, puddling on the floor tiles.

Before Michael can dutifully mop up the mess, Ashton snaps at him. “Don’t touch that,” he grumbles. He stomps off to the closet and retrieves the mop on his own, checks to make sure there’s a cleanser cartridge in the slot and cleans up the mess by himself.

Michael stands at the edge of the kitchen watching him the whole time, going, “I can do it, you don’t have to,” and it is all so familiar that Ashton wants to scream. He doesn’t even bother trying to put an end to the feedback loop, figuring that eventually it will run its course or Luke will take pity on his Partner. There’s no time for niceties; by the time he is done with the mop it’s past the time he would normally leave for work so he has to sprint all the way to the mag-train platform, breathing hard when he darts onto the train mere seconds before the doors close on him. It’s not a very good start to the day.

 

The data chip appears on his desk one day when he comes back from his first company-mandated break. It’s just sitting there next to his holoscreen with a post-it note stuck to it. Ashton picks up and turns it over in his hands suspiciously. He reads the attached note carefully. ‘Play me,’ it says. That’s not a particularly illuminating message. He wonders why bother with the note at all. Carefully, he reaches down and thumbs open one of the drawers of his desk and puts the post-it note inside. For a few minutes he sits and watches his surveillance window, watches Calum and the new guy sorting tubes. Briefly he wishes that were still his job. It was much simpler work when the only thing he had to worry about was whether or not the mail arrived on time and occasionally whether a package’s contents were legal. He hates watching the security feeds all day. There’s too much time for him to think about all the things going wrong in his life.

Some of his coworkers bring in personal data chips so that they can listen to music while they’re on the clock. Ashton has not opted to do that so far. He’s not even completely sure where the data ports on his particular holoscreen are. It takes a few minutes before he’s managed to locate them, keeping his eyes trained on the holo at all times. He has a feeling that this chip has something to do with the shadowy and vaguely menacing organization that Rian is a part of. If it’s that, he really doesn’t want to know. Slowly he wiggles the chip into the port until it’s fitted snugly in the slot. The launcher pops up in the corner of his holoscreen and he clicks ‘Execute’ when the actions menu appears. A progress bar appears underneath the launcher and Ashton leaves it be, letting whatever program is on the data chip run in the background as he goes about his usual workday.

Which is to say, he does the crosswords and makes notes about Calum and the new guy in the mailroom. He’s noticed that Calum looks a little glum this morning. He notes it down, privately assuming that it’s because of Luke. And he does feel a little guilty about the whole thing; if they were better friends Ashton might say something to him, some small hint or at least an indication that Luke is okay. Out of loyalty to Luke - who from his actions had made it clear that he wants nothing to do with Calum despite never voicing his wish directly - he stays in his seat, watching the rapid-fire transfer of mail tubes into the chutes. After about an hour the program has finished running. Another dialog box pops up confirming that the executable file has installed successfully. Vaguely Ashton wonders if there’s some way this can get traced back to him, but at the present he finds that he doesn’t really care if he does get in trouble for it. Installing programs on a local server will garner him a slap on the wrist at best.

If it’s something more than that - like malware or a virus, maybe - the consequences would be much more severe. Ashton does his best not to think about it. He puts the data chip in his breast pocket when he ejects it, planning to put it down the waste disposal unit at home so it will be smashed into bits and pieces. That’s the safest place to put it. All the waste in each sector is centrally collected, so unless someone is stupid enough to throw away something incriminating whole with the recycling it’s a pretty safe bet that any damning information could never be traced back to the culprit.

He thinks about that on the mag-train home. When he comes inside Luke’s on the couch, lazily flicking through the holo feeds. “You have to do something about Michael,” he says, looking harassed. “He’s been driving me crazy all day.” Ashton knows exactly what happened while he was gone all day without having to ask. He can almost picture it in his mind’s eye: Michael, propelled by his conditioning to clean obsessively, was probably trying to dust some dust particles or something and came upon Luke stretched out on the couch just like this with his feet kicked up on the arm of the couch. An argument probably followed, ending in Luke getting frustrated and storming off to the laundry room. Which used to be Michael’s spot, even if he doesn’t remember it, so he probably tried to go in there out of habit which would’ve pissed Luke off even more. It’s a simple recipe for disaster.

“How do you think I feel?” Ashton grumbles, kicking his shoes off in a pile on the floor. Michael can deal with them; it’ll make him happy, probably.

A resounding bang comes from the kitchen, making them both jump. “Well, shit,” Luke says, getting up from the couch. “Anything interesting happen today? Besides your boyfriend nearly blowing up the kitchen, I mean.” Lesser men than Ashton would be annoyed by Luke’s constant snarkiness. Ashton finds it refreshing. They get to the kitchen too late to stop the sink from flooding over the edge of the counter and onto the floor, but they are just in time to see Michael’s pained expression at the growing puddle in front of him.

“Everything is under control,” Michael announces. It’s not - Ashton steps through the puddle and jiggles the tap methodically until the spurts of water stop coming and soaks the hem of his shirt in the process. Water soaks through his socks. He doesn’t mind having wet feet all that much; it’s just walking on any surface in wet socks feels terrible, so after he’s fixed the sink temporarily he swears and strips out of his socks. It would be nice if BLITS had left at least some of Michael’s memory intact - if not all the kissing stuff then at least the useful stuff, like that the sink leaks unless the tap gets jiggled on a semi-regular basis while the water runs. Even Luke had figured that much out on his own. Although it’s rather unfair to paint Luke and Michael with the same brush at the moment since Michael is at a significant disadvantage.

“Yep,” Ashton tells him cheerfully, stepping around him where he’s stood with the mop gawking at all the water on the floor. He pecks Michael on the cheek and adds, “Completely under control.” He remembers about the data chip in his pocket and fishes it out, drops it down the waste disposal and revels in the angry grinding noise the unit makes while it chews through the plastic.

Normally Michael would have laughed with him, asked what happened with the chip. Current Michael ignores him in favor of mopping up the massive puddle, leaving Ashton free to retreat to the living room with Luke. He drops onto the vacant spot on the couch and reaches for his netportal on the coffee table. “Oh, borrowed that earlier,” Luke tells him. “You’ve got messages.” And Ashton sighs. He likes Luke - he really does - but in some ways living with him over these couple of days has been like living with a teenage boy. Not a particularly tidy one, either. The last time Ashton had gone to shower the floor in the bathroom had been wet and there had been used towels just sitting on the floor instead of hanging up where they might eventually dry out a bit.

So Ashton opens his e-net portal and, as advertised, he does have new messages waiting for him. Most of them are the predictable bullshit messages he expects - an invoice for delivery fees from BLITS - but there’s one from earlier in the afternoon that simply says, ‘Payment accepted. Will communicate further details at earliest convenience.’ Ashton wonders if that’s what the program running in the background had been while he had had the chip in his holoscreen. He’d been too afraid to look at it, so he had just let it run while he dicked around.

“Any idea what you’re going to do?” he asks Luke.

“I kind of want to stay,” Luke confesses. “Apparently Melbourne has, like, acid rain? So I’m probably not going there, at least.” Neither of them know if it’s possible for him to stay in the city. Ashton has the barest idea of how the process works - most of it he’s gleaned in bits and pieces from film and net-dramas, and he won’t be able to get confirmation of his theories until the next time he speaks to Rian. He has no idea when that will be, so he’s erring on the side of caution with everything that’s happening.

In another lifetime Michael would’ve come to sit on the couch with them, maybe stretched out in the space between them and draped himself across Ashton’s lap all warm and comfortable. The reality of it is that he hovers awkwardly in the hallway until Ashton says, “Hey, come in here and sit with us,” and Michael folds himself slowly into the uncomfortable armchair that had been Ashton’s mother’s contribution to his housewarming party. Now that he’s still Ashton notices him quivering like a nervous chihuahua. He hadn’t been like that before - well, he’d been fidgety but never so much like this - and it makes something anxious low in Ashton’s gut unfurl. Silently he takes up his netportal again and types in ‘constant shaking’. Tremors are on the first page of search results. He scrolls through the related conditions quickly before he nudges Luke and taps on the screen.

“What,” Luke whispers. Though whispering and Luke are relative terms - Luke couldn’t whisper if his life depended on it - so it comes out more like a murmur. He scans the text, glances sidelong at Michael, and nods. “That’s definitely something to be concerned about,” he decides.

The only way, Ashton decides, to know for sure how bad the tremors are is to experiment. He picks one of the dumb plastic figurines that had come with the place - they’re basically indestructible on top of being painfully kitschy - and says, “Hey, catch this,” and tosses it in Michael’s general direction. The figure goes toppling to the floor. Michael’s hand had flown up instinctively to deflect the incoming object, his fingers had closed around it but too slowly, too shakily, to get a good grasp of it before it went flying. Ashton groans internally and turns back to his netportal. ‘We’ve got a slight problem over here,’ he types into the body of an empty message to the organization. ‘Mechanical failure,’ he says, and leaves it at that. He hopes that they’ll be able to pick up his meaning. It’s not the safest channel of communication, but it’s what he’s got and he hasn’t got anyone else he can just ask.

It’s not like he can just email Rian at work to ask questions about stuff like this. Maybe in the beginning he could have without either of them getting any flak for it, but enough time has come and gone now that it would be an instant red flag. He could go down to the tavern, but that’s an awfully long way to travel on a whim and especially to such a bad sector late in the evening. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” Luke says. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”

His hand closes around Ashton’s elbow. It’s not a friendly gesture but something close to one; Ashton shrugs it off and says, “Yeah. I’m going to bed,” and halfway out of the room he turns around and says, “Come lie down with me,” to Michael. This whole situation is making his head spin. He needs something to help ground him, even if it’s not real. Michael follows him obediently to bed. Ashton doesn’t bother stripping out of his clothes when he lies down. If he gets undressed it’s too much like what they were before. He needs to remind himself that things are different now.

Michael lies down on the other side of the mattress. It’s close enough that Ashton could reach out and touch him if he wanted to; he doesn’t. He curls up in the same tight little ball he had slept in the night before, waiting to see if something snaps loose inside Michael and he returns to his former self. Nothing like that happens. Frustration wells up inside Ashton and he tamps it down. The only sounds in the room are their breathing - Michael’s even and measured, his own ragged and frustrated - and it’s distracting. “Are you feeling ill?” Michael asks, sitting up to press the back of his hand against Ashton’s forehead. His hand is cold to the touch.

“I’m fine.” Ashton rolls over so that he’s facing the wall and squeezes his eyes shut tightly.

The next morning he has a response in his inbox. It simply says, ‘The usual spot. Don’t be late.’ Through the haze in his mind in the early morning, Ashton interprets it as a warning and goes to work absolutely on time. He has to - Michael wakes him up on the first alarm and he can’t find the fight in himself to beg for those extra ten minutes’ sleep. Luke grimaces at him when they enter the kitchen. “No luck, huh,” he says dryly.

Ashton rolls his eyes and tells him, “I’ve had better conversations with paint drying. They want to speak to me today. I’ll probably be late getting home, so don’t wait up.” Luke’s mood visibly improves at this turn of events. He pours himself another cup of coffee and sits back on the other side of the counter island, pushing himself back and forth on the bar stool so that the seat swivels. It’s childish, but still infinitely more welcome than Michael’s jerky mechanical movements. It’s not right. Ashton can’t look at him. He hates thinking about it. Something has gone wrong; he doesn’t know what it is but there’s this wrongness to the way Michael moves and even speaks that indicates much more sinister things than he’s willing to consider.

In true fashion, he goes about his day not-thinking about it. It’s like any other day - he does his crossword, he makes a few bullshit notes on what happens in the mailroom - except that it’s not, because his heart speeds up and then slows down again thinking about making the long trek to the tavern. Ashton’s just hoping that the news Rian has for him is good news, if it’s Rian at all that he’s meeting with tonight. That thought keeps him warm when he huddles on the balcony in the wet and damp during the mandated break periods. He hasn’t started smoking, yet - all the other people from the cubicles do, staining their teeth and fingertips slightly yellow or slightly brown from years of substance abuse. This day goes by faster than the ones that came before it. Ashton’s relieved to find that he doesn’t mind the work so much with another purpose behind it. He doesn’t have a very important job. He knows it. Armstrong had tried to dress it up like he was doing important work, sitting day after day in a cubicle watching other people go through the motions of their day, but now he knows better than that.

He thinks about that while he huddles by one of the columns on the mag-train platform outside. Calum’s there, huddled by a different column with the new guy from the mailroom looking grim. Ashton thinks about going over and talking to him. There’s nothing to be said between them, though, and besides it would look funny. He settles for a brief smile and some eye contact. It can’t hurt anything. Finally the train shows up and the employees all rush toward it like lemmings, each rubbing their thumb over the scanner out of habit. Sometimes Ashton wonders whether the scanner actually registers prints at all or if it’s just there for show, there to frighten them into relying on the corps for transport like they do for just about everything else. If they don’t register prints then it would be a good thing. A good thing for people like Luke, at the very least, whose prints are not registered but who might need to get somewhere in a hurry. He’ll ask Rian about it if he remembers in the face of all the other things that need to be taken care of.

At least it doesn’t take as long to find his way to the tavern through the winding streets this time. It’s just started raining when he gets to the door; he has to knock three or four times before the barkeeper opens it and barks, “About time, boy,” at him before swinging the door open wide to him.

It’s noisier inside the tavern than it had been the last time Ashton had been by, more people inside. He supposes that it’s easier to get to during the week. Less out of place for someone to stop by for a drink after work, be late getting home than it would be on weekends. He ducks inside and pulls the door closed tight behind him, glancing around to pick Rian out of the crowd. Ashton’s almost certain he recognizes two of the faces tucked away in one of the back booths. Their heads are leaned so close together it’s impossible to tell. It wouldn’t be any of his business, anyway, and if he notices one of the men winks at him as he passes by he pretends that he never noticed it.

“Hey,” he says as he slides into the booth across from Rian.

“Your message seemed urgent,” Rian tells him. “Has something happened with Luke?” His expression is one of genuine concern. On the table he’s got various piles of odds and ends sorted into meticulous piles. Ashton can’t tell what the organizational system might be. It doesn’t matter either way; this time he’s come with his own form of payment.

Ashton sighs. “No, Luke’s fine. Michael came home though and… something’s wrong with him. You can see how I might not want to send him back to BLITS if they’re just gonna send him back damaged again.” He tells Rian all of the symptoms he’s noticed over the last two evenings. They go back and forth on a few of them - the tremors in particular - and the liquor flows freely. The barkeeper takes a few odds and ends from Rian’s piles each time he comes by their booth, and each time he returns he’s got a new round of drinks made for them, each equally delicious as the last. They talk about Luke’s plans for a while, too, though they can’t make much headway with that until Rian hears back from one of his contacts outside the city.

Rian pulls out a tablet eventually, taps at a few things and then slides it across the table for Ashton to look at. “I’ve been mocking up a fake profile for Luke in my free time. Take this when you go and see what he thinks about it. Obviously we can make changes to it - I thought it might be good to have a template to work from to start.” And he’s right; Ashton skims the pages of data, fake vital statistics and even things like school marks and blood type. There are even randomly generated sims in the files. Seeing them makes Ashton’s stomach turn over. He knows Luke won’t like that. Luke would like it even less if he had to do the sims himself. It’s probably better that they randomize most of the data. If he ends up going to one of the other cities it won’t make much of a difference. The further he goes from New South Wales, the less cities tend to adhere to the guidelines laid out after the Crash. For instance, if Luke moved somewhere like Melbourne - acid rain and all - he would have complete freedom of movement and even a certain amount of choice in his potential career path.

“What am I supposed to do about Michael?” Ashton sighs. He’s got several drinks in him at this point, so the text on the tablet is getting hard to read. The piles of knick-knacks - that’s what they’re called, Rian had told him - have been whittled down to a collection of pennies and a handful of strings of glass beads.

“I might be able to get his latest scans,” Rian says. He drums his fingers on the tabletop - and as long as Ashton has known him he’s been doing that on whatever surface he can get his hands on, like there’s music inside him trying to escape - and stabs at the screen of his palmtab viciously. It’s still network-enabled; a few minutes later he’s peering at the tiny screen and zooming in on grainy images of either cauliflower or a human brain. Ashton sincerely hopes it’s the latter. He wonders aloud how Rian can be a part of the group and have his palmtab on all the time with network capability. “Oh, that,” Rian says. “I had an acquaintance jam the tracker. I can’t turn it off because I’m on call a lot of the time at work. Because, you know, the human brain. It breaks.”

And he goes back to peering at the display and frowning. He says ‘Oh’ a couple of times in a way that Ashton really, really doesn’t like. “Well?” Ashton prompts him.

He shakes his head. “It’s not looking good.” He taps on the palmtab screen, expanding the image of one of the brain screens. “This area right here looks like it’s shrunk.” The words ring in Ashton’s ear. ‘Not looking good’ is not what he wants to hear. He wants Michael back - the real Michael. Like, slave-brain Michael is sweet and helpful and everything he’s supposed to be, but that’s half the problem. Ashton doesn’t want sweet and helpful. He wants grumpy and argumentative and prone to fidgeting and can’t keep his hands off anything for longer than thirty seconds. The idea that he might be stuck with sweet and helpful for the rest of his life is mildly horrifying.

The only thing he can think to say is, “Shit.” The barkeeper comes around, somehow knowing to bring them shots instead of another round of whiskey or tequila. Ashton hardly tastes his shot, he swallows it so fast. The alcohol burns his throat as it goes down. It’s better that way. This is not the kind of information you swallow without it burning. At least now there’s a purpose to the bile creeping up his throat. “Shit,” he says again.

Rian says “I’m sorry,” like he’s supposed to, and his voice is tinged with regret because he had a personal stake in Michael’s inception too. He’s the one who pulled the strings all along, making sure that things went smoothly even when Ashton was too busy being a stick in the mud to consider the feelings of anyone else in the situation. So Rian had been the one sending him the development notes this whole time, hoping that he would take the initiative to open them and he never had. Not until it was too late, at least. “We’ll get him out,” Rian goes, and Ashton has lost track of the conversational thread. He doesn’t know if they’re talking about Michael or Luke anymore, if it even matters which one. He takes the tablet home with Luke’s fake profile on it, more confused than ever about what to do. Even though he’s not alone in the situation he feels plenty alone in his own head. It’s hard to puzzle out. He think about it the whole way home and doesn’t come out of it with any clarity. After he gives the tablet to Luke and explains what to do, he’s too tired to do much besides fall into bed fully clothed.

 

A day passes with no word from Rian or anyone else in the organization.

Ashton is learning to recognize them, slowly. He knows Rian and Feldy, of course. and even though he hasn’t been allowing himself to think about it he knows that he saw Saporta and Beckett huddled close in the booth that night, heads bent together talking in low voices. There are allies in strange places. In the afternoon another data chip appears on his desk, this time without a note. He still knows what to do with it; he pops it into the slot on the holoscreen and executes the program. Work has gotten boring enough that he keeps the window open and watches as the program runs. Lines of code scroll rapidly through the command prompt window. A login screen appears at the end of it all. Ashton clicks ‘Continue’ without typing anything in and it refuses to let him proceed.

It’s a test, maybe. He stares at the login screen for a while thinking about what the combination might be. It has to be something hidden in plain sight. He’s sure of that part. Hesitantly, he keys in his login information the way he had when he was in school. The pop-up comes back with ‘Incorrect password. 1 of 5 password attempts failed.’ Next he tries the same combination he uses for his e-net and fails his second attempt. It mustn’t be a time-sensitive action, he thinks, and so he puts a considerable amount of thought into it while he watches the surveillance feed. He tries a third time to break into the program. The fact that he overthinks things is not a closely guarded secret. Especially if the person engineering his introduction to the inner workings of shadowy, vaguely menacing organizations has known him for years and literally knows how his brain works.

Rian would be the one to make a secret code something so glaringly obvious. Grumpily, Ashton types in his initials in the username field and types his date of birth numerically. The program accepts his input and a moment later information is flashing across the screen too quickly for him to read it all. At the bottom of the screen a message reading ‘Transaction complete’ before it goes blank and no amount of clicking or stabbing at the keyboard can bring the text back up. He mutters under his breath darkly about what a clever bastard Rian is and checks to make sure nothing else needs to be done before he ejects the data chip.

He’s fairly sure that the chips themselves are useless once they’ve been run, anyway. It’s an old habit he can’t rid himself of. And old habits die hard; at the end of the day when he’s huddled amongst the other lemmings waiting for the mag-train, Calum approaches him looking bluer than he’s ever seen and he can’t make himself stay away. “Hey,” Calum sighs, joining him in the huddle. It’s been raining more, so they’re trying to avoid being dripped on.

“Hey,” Ashton says back. “How have you been?”

Calum sighs again, like he’s waiting for Ashton to ask the right combination of questions. Well, he has no patience for mind games or the social conventions that go along with this friendship anymore. When Ashton doesn’t press the line of questioning any further than that, Calum comes right out and tells him, “So Luke’s gone.” He has his hands in his pockets, the collar of his jacket turned up to defend him from the biting wind blustering its way through the city today. It’s a display of affected sadness. From their earlier conversations Ashton knows that he’s missing exactly one thing, and that thing is not the real Luke.

Rather than saying any of this and poking the sleeping bear, he scrunches his mouth up sympathetically and goes, “Mm. Sorry to hear that.” The train pulls up to the platform and the employees rush for it again, giving Ashton the perfect opportunity to say, “See you around,” and quickly disappear into a different train car than the one Calum gets on. He feels shitty about it, but he’s not going to go around dripping with sympathy for someone who didn’t even know how good he had it. Luke was perfect. He reflects on this the whole way home, chewing the inside of his cheek like he’s prone to doing until he tastes rust in his mouth and realizes he’s broken the skin with his teeth.

Ashton intends to steal away to the laundry room so he can have a whispered conversation with Luke - which is becoming more frequent as the days pass by, he’s willing to admit. What actually happens is that he gets home and kicks his shoes off and unceremoniously dumps his jacket and bag on the floor fully intending to hang them up properly after he’s done speaking with Luke. “I am pretty sure they have me uploading viruses into a government server for them,” he admits in the safety and closeness of the laundry room.

They have the door closed. It’s not that either of them thinks Michael might overhear and think the worst of them - “I’m not sure he can think at all,” Luke says, dragging his fingers through his already-messy blonde hair and making it stand up in little peaks and ridges - but because it’s easier to explain away a locked door and feign ignorance than it is to have handlers burst into Ashton’s living room and overhear them talking about things that are definitely very illegal. “Anyway,” Luke sighs, “I think I’m really going to do it.”

“Do what?” Ashton asks, turning to fold the load of laundry that has recently come out of the dryer. Michael’s a clumsy housekeeper at best. Even if he’s not in love with this version of Michael, he’s decided, there’s no point in being a slobby asshole intentionally. So he’s folding clothes and setting them in the laundry basket on top of the machine to take back up to his bedroom with him after. He likes it, too, because it gives him something to do with his hands at a time when he feels like he might otherwise explode.

“I’m going to move back here. I like it here. You’ll still be my friend, right?” Luke asks. His expression is so soft and earnest - and Ashton really does enjoy his company. It’s not what he had expected when Luke had turned up on the doorstep - he can’t in a million years consolidate the image of crisp and perfect Luke doting over Calum with this Luke, messy and impulsive and often sarcastic - but when has anything ever turned out the way he expected it to? Ashton has found that he likes the unpredictable things in life best.

So he says back, “Obviously. We’re both in this, you know?”

It is such a perfect friendship moment. He hasn’t had one of these, one like this, in a long time. Maybe ever. Friendship isn’t a valuable currency in these times. Friendship is fickle and ephemeral. They reach out at the same time and Luke falls against him, laughing. “I’m glad I have you,” Luke goes, clumsy and grateful and so, so tall.

There’s a hard rap at the laundry room door. Ashton closes his eyes and ignores it. He’s not ready to deal with Michael just yet - Michael and his broken brain, the broken parts of himself that have fallen apart with the assurance that things will never be the same again. It sucks. It sucks, and Ashton puts everything he has into this hug. He’s got his eyes closed and the door swings open. He can hear the squeaky hinge; he’s been meaning to fix it for ages and never gotten around to actually doing it. Like most things in his life, he thinks. “We have each other,” he decides. “We have each other’s backs.”

The kiss comes as a surprise. Ashton is not expecting it to happen and when it does - Luke’s lips pressed wet and quick and darting against the corner of his mouth - he stands there for a full minute, wondering why time has not frozen everything else in place. Instead there’s Michael standing in the doorway and Luke with his hands clapped over his mouth. “Oh,” Michael goes, and the sound is so flat and hollow that it knocks a hole in Ashton’s chest. “How long has this been going on for?”

Luke tries to gasp out an explanation past his embarrassment. “It hasn’t - We’re not,” he says.

And Ashton considers whether Michael actually cares or if he’s just doing what he’s supposed to do. He gets his answer in the form of Michael coming further into the room and sucker-punching Luke, who recoils back into the corner clutching his face like a wounded baby bird. “What the fuck,” Michael shouts, face all determination and anger and redness creeping in from his hairline down to his collarbones. He rounds on Luke, cornering him into the little space where his things used to be. All the tension in his body is focused in his fists.

“Get out,” someone says. Ashton doesn’t recognize his own voice. He’s never sounded so authoritative before. But Michael goes, all stomping and glaring over his shoulder. “What the fuck just happened here?” he asks himself, bending to pluck a towel from the pile of dirty clothes that still need to be washed. “You okay?” he asks Luke, giving him a once-over. There’s a faint trickle of blood coming from one of his nostrils, so Ashton tells him to tilt his head forward and hold his nose in the right place. Once that is taken care of - he gives Luke firm instructions to dab at it and keep his head inclined until it stops so he doesn’t swallow any of the blood - he goes upstairs to deal with Michael.

Michael echoes his “Get out,” lying facedown on the bed. The pitch of his voice is high and tight, like he’s been crying. And Ashton doesn’t know what to make of that - the implications of it being too much to bear at the moment - so he just sits at the edge of the mattress and waits for Michael to stop. Because he throws fits, yeah, but eventually they end and then they can talk about it and everything turns out okay. If… If it is what he thinks. If it’s not - if his brain is even more broken than it was before - Ashton knows what he needs to do but is not prepared to do it. Not yet.

He sits there. He waits. The heaving of Michael’s back slows and he asks, “Are you finished now?” Then, “Are you back?” He holds his breath waiting for an answer. To the second question, not the first one. And it’s the painful kind of waiting where his question hangs in the air, unanswered in burdensome, and he wants to crawl into a deep hole the longer it stretches on.

“I didn’t go anywhere,” Michael says to him at last. He sits up on the bed, crosses his legs and gathers one of the pillows into his lap the way he usually does. Do not read too much into it, Ashton thinks resolutely to himself. It could be nothing. It could be everything, too - but he’s not thinking about that. And there’s Luke to consider, probably bleeding from one nostril still in the laundry room. Michael repeats himself and then, “Ash?” in the tiniest voice he can muster. He’s staring down at his own hands, shaking violently with tremors, and his eyes are rimmed with red like he’s been crying. It’s all a bit much to bear. He says Ashton’s name again like that, like he’s trying to figure this all out.

It turns out to be Ashton’s turn to cry after bottling his emotions up for so long. “You were gone,” he manages to choke out. “And then Luke turned up and asked for my help and it’s just this whole big mess and I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“So you kissed Luke.” It’s not an accusation. It might be resignation - like Michael’s resigned himself to the fact that Ashton’s been going around kissing other people even though he hasn’t been. Ashton doesn’t like that. He doesn’t know what to say; he doesn’t know what he can say in his own defense because he knows what it looked like, closed door and all. And that’s what it was supposed to look like, is the shitty part, only it wasn’t supposed to look like that to Michael. He wasn’t… Michael was gone, mentally checked out, and Ashton doesn’t understand what happened to make him different again. Not entirely different but aware enough of the situation to feel betrayed by Ashton’s actions. He looks like he is still struggling with his programming. He repeats the part about kissing Luke again and Ashton can only shake his head in disbelief.

“I - You don’t even know what’s been going on,” Ashton protests. “That’s not fair. And I didn’t kiss him back! I’ve been too busy freaking out about what’s been happening with you to even think about anything else,” he says. Michael narrows his eyes suspiciously but says nothing. So he continues. “They came for you. They came in the middle of the night, woke me up out of a dead sleep and they took you back to BLITS and you came back like this… Like this awful robot, I guess, and you wouldn’t talk to me and Luke was already here and I had to be so careful not to let you know anything because basically everything I’m doing right now is illegal. So the laundry room was the only place we could talk, really, because I’m helping Luke smuggle himself out of the city after he left Calum.”

“Oh,” Michael goes softly. Just ‘Oh’ and then a breathy, relieved laugh. His hands continue to shake. He frowns at them and shakes them both out, as if that can make it stop.

Ashton doesn’t know where they’re at right now. “So,” he says. “You were gone for almost three weeks. I don’t - I don’t even know if this is really you or if it’s just, like, something new they’re throwing at me to fuck everything up. I missed you,” he admits, pausing to swipe away the tears that refuse to stop beading up at the corners of his eyes. He reaches out for Michael’s trembling hand and squeezes it tight. “It’s probably stupid to admit that, right?”

Michael shakes his head ‘no’. “I should probably apologize to Luke, huh,” Michael says hesitantly.

The flood of relief that fills Ashton is so intense that it feels like he’s floating outside his body at first. He lunges across the bed to hug Michael, pleased when the gesture is reciprocated in full. “You’re such an asshole,” Ashton says. He decides that he’ll explain about everything later - for now he’s just happy that things are kind of okay. Michael - his Michael, the real one - is back. Maybe not completely, maybe not the same way as before, but he’s laughing and crying and kissing the top of Ashton’s head and he whispers ‘I’m sorry’ over and over again before letting go of him to go apologize to Luke. Ashton trails after, hanging back outside the laundry room door while the two of them make up.

He doesn’t hear most of what gets said between them. At the end of it Luke and Michael hug and Luke goes, “You’re probably my best friend in the whole world, you dick,” and he punches Michael in the arm. Then he says, “Sorry for getting weird,” and Ashton knows that it’s an apology for a kiss - all of them know - and after that has been said none of them ever mention it again. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you go around mentioning when there are more important things to be dealt with. He’s not proud of a lot of the things he has done lately. They’re necessary evils, he knows, but telling Michael about them is about as appealing as cutting his own hand off at this point. He’s dealt with enough in the past twenty-four hours to feel like he deserves a break at least for the night. By some kind of unspoken agreement neither he nor Luke tell Michael everything that’s happened that night. Instead they order a pizza and congregate on the couch so Michael can catch up on all the holos he’s missed while he was gone.

It might not be perfect, but it’s something.

 

“My hands won’t stop shaking,” Michael complains later. “What’s wrong with me?”

Ashton sighs. He rolls over in bed to avoid answering the question and feigns sleepiness. It’s early enough in the morning - and Michael’s internal clock is fucked up completely - that for a few minutes it almost works. Michael’s arm snakes around his waist, pulling him in so he’s comfortable and warm. He could go back to sleep, he thinks, if he didn’t have work to do and work to get through. Also, he doesn’t want to get out of bed and have to face reality. It’s much less fun than lying here and pretending that everything has gone back to normal. The tremors are hard to ignore in all their severity.

Michael prods him until he rolls back over. “Tell me. I know you guys aren’t telling me everything,” he sighs, leaning over for a kiss before pulling back to eye Ashton warily. It’s easy enough to distract him; all Ashton has to do is link his arms behind Michael’s neck and pull him down for another kiss and then another, taking advantage of Michael’s typical one track-mindedness. Except for the part where Michael is fully aware he’s being advantage of and tries to make muffled protests through the kisses, twisting around so he can press his mouth to Ashton’s neck and insist, “Come on. Tell me. It can’t be that bad,” in his sulkiest tone of voice.

“It is,” Ashton sighs. He doesn’t want to do this now - not when Michael is still coming down from whatever damage BLITS had done him - but it seems that he doesn’t have a choice. “How much do you remember?” he asks, first.

“I,” Michael falters. “I don’t know. It’s all kind of a blur. I didn’t even know I had been gone until you said,” and he presses his face into the pillow, frustrated. The flush comes back to his face across his cheekbones and along the back of his neck. Ashton rubs at his neck, raking his fingers through the fine baby hairs at the nape of his neck absent-mindedly until Michael huffs and burrows deeper into the mess of blankets. “I don’t know if I want to remember,” Michael confesses. Ashton can’t fault him for that. He wouldn’t want to remember either - people messing about with his brain, changing his reality until he doesn’t know which way is up anymore - but he understands why Michael wants to know, why he wants that control over his own life. He moves his fingers through Michael’s hair until he’s calm enough. Until they are both calm enough for the conversation that needs to happen.

He clears his throat first. He doesn’t want to do this. “I talked to - do you remember Dawson? Your development tech?” He’s never been certain how much they retain from their time in the tanks. Michael nods uncertainly, gnawing fastidiously at his left thumbnail. “Anyway,” Ashton says. “I talked to him about it, he got copies of your scans for me, and it’s… It’s not looking good.” Thinking of the grainy images Rian had shown him, he sighs and strokes his hand through Michael’s hair again, wondering where the place in his skull is that the damaged part of his brain hides under. Not for the first time Ashton wishes he could just reach in and fix it. Fix whatever crossed wires there are even if it means he loses this version of Michael again. Because more than anything else he hates Michael being distressed, and he’s definitely distressed about the tremors and the moments he absolutely falls out of himself and ends up standing in the middle of a room staring blankly, unable to remember what he had been about to do.

All night he had run his fingers through Michael’s hair, feeling his scalp carefully. There are no seams that feel like they’ve been newly sewn up, no knotted scars under Ashton’s fingertips to confirm that anything as bad as he’s been thinking has taken place. Rian had assured him up and down that the only thing they use at the BLITS facility is the high-frequency pulse lights to change Partner conditioning.

“Something went wrong,” Ashton says quietly. “Rian says he doesn’t know what, yet, but… I mean, it’s not good. Are you sure you want to know this?” Michael reaches out with his free hand - the one not in his mouth - and curls it around Ashton’s, shaking slightly. A long sigh escapes from Ashton. He says, “We think they shrunk part of your brain. The, um,” he struggles to remember the clinical term for it. “Cerebellum,” he remembers. “It’s the part of your brain that deals with movement and stuff.”

“So I’m officially defective, then.”

The statement hangs in the air for a long time before Ashton knows how to answer it. “You’re not broken,” he says fiercely, climbing into Michael’s lap with the blankets bunched up in an awkward pile between their hips. Michael opens his mouth to argue. “You’re not,” Ashton insists, leaning forward and kissing him roughly before he can manage to get the words out. He genuinely means it, too. As long as they can pretend - and he hates going back to that, but it’s always there just within their reach - that nothing is wrong, there should be no reason for Michael to go back to BLITS again for more work. He thinks that Beckett and Saporta might help him keep up the facade. He’s not sure yet. Everything is a bit uncertain.

Michael kisses him back eagerly. That at least is the same - his clumsy hands at the small of Ashton’s back, the way he makes breathy little noises in the back of his throat that he’ll be embarrassed of later. He pulls and pulls at Ashton’s clothes until Ashton cooperates and strips out of his dingy t-shirt, too hot under the pile of blankets anyway. The jeans - he had fallen asleep in them, too glad and tired to shimmy his way out of them when he could have been cuddling Michael instead - require more effort. “Get these off,” Michael whines, mouth inches away from Ashton’s as he sits up to shove at the tight fabric crossly.

“Hey, do you - Ugh, I’m scarred for life. Put some clothes on,” Luke calls from outside their bedroom door. Michael mutters something unflattering under his breath but otherwise obliges, untangling himself from the sheets to follow Ashton down to the kitchen. They should really start sleeping with the door closed, Ashton thinks; he’d gotten used to leaving it open at night in case Luke needed him for anything. And Luke had apparently gotten used to poking his head into the room whenever he felt like it. They’ll both have to work on the whole ‘boundaries’ thing. For now he’s content to sit on one of the stools in front of the counter with Luke and drink a cup of over-brewed coffee from the beverage synthesizer. The filter needs changed, judging from the taste of the sludge it had spewed out. It’s another of those things that can wait a while before it really starts to bother him.

He’s getting pretty good at pretending not to notice things. It’s a side effect of the situation they’re all in; he checks his messages and finds himself disappointed not to find anything new, even though no news is generally good news. So Ashton sits with his makeshift family and drinks his coffee and pretends not to be dreading the workday. He’s not entirely convinced that Luke and Michael aren’t going to murder each other before the day’s through. It’s not… It’s not that he thinks he needs to babysit them, necessarily, but Michael had been struggling to shake off the conditioning that BLITS had put him through. He wishes that there was mandated time off after a recalibration the same way there is for the initial activation. Of course there’s not - it wouldn’t make sense to give time off like some kind of reward when the procedure is only necessary because freedom of thought in Partners is seen as a bad thing, a problem to be solved.

Ashton grits his teeth and bears it, slogging his way through each minute of the workday with one eye on the clock. Nothing remarkable happens that day; he completes the crosswords and watches Calum bumble around in the mailroom, feeling guiltier about the Luke situation with each passing day. He should say something. There’s some leftover loyalty he can’t force himself to let go of. The only thing stopping him from doing it is his loyalty to Luke, too - Luke who had been there when Michael was gone and Calum wasn’t, Luke who is trying to pull himself up by the bootstraps and make something better out of this situation than what he was given. He thinks about that for the rest of the day. It’s an admirable trait, that. Despite his inherent laziness - and Ashton wonders how Calum didn’t notice this, decides he doesn’t want to reflect on some of his early conversations about Luke with Calum - the thing about Luke is that underneath that is a layer of intense drive. He’s the kind of person that you aim at a goal and then he gets there, no matter how long it takes.

Maybe Michael’s not so bad off with him at home after all. If there’s anyone that Ashton would entrust with his Partner - aside from Rian and maybe Feldy, whom he’s still on the fence about - it would be Luke. They might even be best friends.

 

Quickly the afternoons turn into a routine - Ashton gets home from work and does the tidying-up after what he’s begun to think of fondly as his boys, dropping a kiss on Michael’s cheek if they’re sat on the couch with his netportal and the tablet synced to it, doing fake sims for Luke’s profile. “Hey,” Luke calls after him one day as he’s sweeping out the front hallway. “Do you think I’m more of a fall or winter person?” Beside him, Michael rolls his eyes and makes a mean gesture behind his back. Despite his earlier reservations they’ve actually begun to get along beautifully, often forgetting that he’s in the same room with them when they’re wrapped up in conversation.

Ashton looks at him and sighs. “You’re a summer,” he says, looking at Luke’s light hair and eyes and thinking immediately of warm sand on the beach. Not that he’s ever been to a beach - not that any of them will ever see the beach or the ocean - but he thinks Luke looks like the ocean. He puts the broom back in its place in the closet and piles onto the couch with his boys. They’re making great strides with his profile in the time between him getting the tablet pre-loaded with all the sims and tests included in a standard personnel file. It’s down to the nit and grit of it while they wait for the day two weeks from now when someone - probably Beckett or Saporta - comes in the middle of the night to hustle Luke away in the back of one of the BLITS vans to take him outside the city. In the time that he’s away, Rian and Feldy will plant the data in one of the government servers as if Luke were always a normal citizen, create a fake paper trail of his life before New Sydney.

Michael’s hands tremble at his waist slightly. He’s been moody lately, unable to tinker with any of his odds and ends in the laundry room. Not for lack of trying - he had tried and ended up crying in frustration when his shaking hands made it impossible for the delicate work he used to do modding game consoles, tablets, anything he could get his hands on. “Give it here,” he commands Luke, reaching over Ashton for the tablet. He presses a sloppy kiss to the side of Ashton’s neck, hooks his chin over Ashton’s shoulder and sets himself to the task of ticking off selections so Luke won’t agonize over each and every one of them. If there’s one thing that Luke absolutely is, it’s indecisive. A few minutes later, he’s reached the end of the assessment and hands it back triumphantly.

“You get far too much joy out of doing these,” Luke bitches.

“Fuck off,” Michael whines. “I’m never going to get to do ‘em and you don’t even like doing these! It’s doing you a favor.” They paw at each other childishly, poking and prodding each other over Ashton’s shoulder through peals of laughter.

They had discussed leaving the city. Had discussed it with Rian, who Michael finally met properly and was friendship-smitten by for all of ten minutes, and then Feldy. The long and the short of it is that they can’t do it. Michael’s brain damage is too severe to get past the scanners at the airlock; everyone who enters the city has to be scanned to ensure they remain at the optimum level of public health. Ashton privately thinks that is all a bit bullshit, but even if they managed to engineer it so that someone within the organization is working the scanners the day they land there’s no way to guarantee that they would pass through that specific checkpoint. There are too many unknown variables. Even if they could do it, neither of them want to go enough to make it worthwhile.

Then there’s Luke to consider. Over time Ashton has come to think of him almost as a little brother. “Stop bickering, you two,” Ashton tells them. He’s going to be sad to see Luke go. They’ve grown close, the three of them, and he hates to think that that dynamic will have to change once Luke has his own life and his own work to do. They’ll still see each other - he doubts Michael would let him off the hook if they lost contact with Luke - but it won’t be the same, after. He reaches across and pinches Luke’s cheek. Luke, too engrossed in the sim he’s running, barely even notices. He doesn’t often notice gentle touches; unlike Michael, whose skin is so sensitive the slightest touch can tickle him if he’s not expecting it, the analgesic never fully wore off for Luke. It makes him accident-prone and likely to burn himself without noticing. There are a couple discolored patches of skin on his forearms from when he’s rested them on the stove while the burners were still hot. Michael, on the other hand, is as pale and creamy as the day they had met. Ashton prefers him that way - he’s maybe a little masochistic like that, likes to be able to see the marks he sucks into Michael’s neck when they make out.

“Aren’t we supposed to go out tonight?” Michael reminds him, breath hot against the back of his neck. Not the time to be thinking about other things when they’ve got to make it halfway across the city and back before curfew hits. Ashton groans, wanting nothing more than to drag Michael upstairs to have his way with him. He’s permanently annoyed about the curfew - a new rule that had been instigated in the last week to prevent untoward activity in the poorest sectors of New Sydney.

In other words, people had been staying out too late at night - probably conducting illegal affairs - and it cut into the profit that corps like BLITS rake in from the thankless work in the industrial and agricultural sectors. Also to cut down on late-night border runs by the organization, probably, but of course no one can come out and say that without having to acknowledge that there is a problem with people helping ex-Partners to escape the city and the BLITS system altogether. Ashton slips into his shoes and jacket and makes Luke promise not to watch any pay-per-second videos on the holo feeds while they’re gone. Luke had thought he didn’t know about that; he’d thought he was being sneaky watching the holo at midnight with earpods in, but Ashton has been saving up this moment to use against him for ages.

“Keep it teen-rated,” Ashton tells him, flicking his gaze purposely to the holo projector and enjoying the way Luke squirms uncomfortably on the couch. Michael, beside him, snickers and presses his mouth against Ashton’s shoulder to hide it. “If you go on the adult holos I’ll know,” and he waggles his eyebrows in what he hopes is a vaguely menacing way.

“Fuck off,” Luke groans, going completely red in the face and sinking into the couch clutching one of Ashton’s largely useless throw pillows.

Privately Ashton is pretty pleased about how well Luke has picked up on regular slang-speak. It’s easy to forget, these days, that Luke was ever someone’s Partner at all. He’s so himself that it’s contradictory to even think about him being subservient to someone. Michael struggles with it still - his words jumble and he’ll ball his hands up at his sides, frustrated and stuttering, until the words come out right or Luke or Ashton fill in the missing word for him. They walk hand in hand to the mag-train platform and Ashton lets himself feel like it’s a date up until the train glides gently to a stop and the doors open, pouring out students chattering noisily with their bags swinging from shoulders, loud and boisterous.

Michael grasps his hand a little bit tighter when other people are around. It’s after rush hour, so they have their pick of the seats in the mostly-empty car. The ride to the tavern is shorter when he’s got company on the way there, Ashton has found. He gets nervous walking from the mag-train platform all the way to the alley, still. It’s nerve-wracking walking out in the open like that, not knowing where the surveillance cameras are or who’s on the other end of them. Now that he knows there are actual people watching his every move - even if they don’t know why, even if no one ever tells them why - he’s careful about how he behaves in public spaces. Even empty spaces - especially empty spaces. He holds tight to Michael’s hand as they walk through the housing development where he’s never seen anyone come or go, weave their way through the mishmash of failing businesses and down the narrow alleyway that’s just wide enough to accommodate the two of them side by side.

“You know, I always hate this walk,” Michael comments. Ashton can see the gears in his head turning - he’s thinking of old-world skateboards, how to modify them with something similar to the hovers in lightpods to glide along the ground with minimal effort. Then the frustration at his trembling hands as he remembers that he can’t make a workable prototype without help. It’s a source of frustration for both of them.

They do the secret knock - not that it’s very secret, to the tune of some old jingle that goes ‘Shave and a haircut’ that no one can find a source for - and the door swings open wide, letting out a thick plume of smoke into the evening air. “Do you think that guy ever leaves?” Ashton asks as they walk to the back booths. He’s never seen the barkeeper anywhere else; only here, and he’s pretty sure that the big metal door at the back leads into the guy’s private quarters. They slide into the booth across from Rian and Feldy.

“So hey,” Rian starts out, barely bothering to look up from the sheafs of paper he’s flicking through. Feldy raises his glass in greeting before taking a sip from it, and bends over the folders to take a look himself. Ashton peers at some of it upside down and can’t make sense of it; the pages are littered with lines and dots that make no sense to him. He shrugs, assuming it must be something scientific that he wouldn’t understand anyway. Michael nudges him and he remembers about the tablet in his bag full of the fabricated data. “Oh, awesome,” Rian goes, skimming through the various sims and other information they’ve spent weeks coming up with. It’s the last piece of the puzzle they need to get Luke out of the city long enough to plant his fake data - aside from, obviously, the black sheep they need to help bring him back in as a legitimate citizen.

As far as these things go, it’s going swimmingly. “We should have a definite move date for you next week,” Feldy says, pulling a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles out of his shirtfront and putting them on. It’s things like this that make Ashton remember how old he is, just how long he’s been at this thing. He’s got hair graying at his temples, lines beginning to develop on his face. His youthful exuberance is what makes people forget most of the time. Overall he’s more like a cool uncle, or something, than a father of two with a respectable career working in the Partner development sector.

No one notices Michael begin to dig through the pages and pages at first, studying them intently, before he starts tapping out rhythms on the tabletop methodically. “It’s sheet music, right?” he asks. He continues working the patterns out, humming softly as he flips through more of the sheets. Ashton hadn’t known he knew how to read sheet music at all - it’s not in common usage anymore, hasn’t been since long before the Crash - and not for the first time he wonders where Rian finds half the things he brings to barter. It’s never occurred to him to ask before. Feldy looks suitably impressed, watching Michael over the top of his spectacles.

“Never knew your boy had a musical bone in him, Irwin,” he comments wryly.

Rian snorts. “He’s not supposed to. Look though,” and he jerks his head slightly at Michael’s hands, which are not trembling slightly for the first time since he’s come home. Michael looks up, suddenly self-conscious, and as soon as he gets pulled out of the melody forming in his head the tremors start back up again. “Keep going,” Rian tells him, and he does, continuing through the sets of sheet music as best he can. The music in the tavern is loud enough that no one outside the booth can hear his humming.

“Would you look at that,” Feldy says. “The human brain is amazingly resilient.” Ashton thinks of the hours Michael has spent just listening to all different kinds of music. It shouldn’t be that surprising, then, that he’d picked up a working knowledge of it. He had thought that was gone with all the other things Michael had needed to relearn. Feldy and Rian seem pleased. He’s not going to infer anything more than that. One thing he learned early on in their new, strange kind of relationship is to lower his expectations. Sometimes it catches him off guard and it’s difficult not to get frustrated and lash out at each other.

“Is that good?” Michael asks after he’s done. He looks at the sheafs of sheet music, printed on yellowed paper that’s so old it crackles to the touch, longingly. No one plays music much anymore; there’s not a huge market for it since what takes hours of musicianship can be generated using mathematical formulas and synthesized in a single program. Ashton carries the thought home with him while they’re on the mag-train. They had spent the rest of the time talking about Luke’s integration. Since, obviously, Calum isn’t involved in this in any capacity Ashton has agreed to act as Luke’s unofficial monitor until it’s time for him to leave.

As soon as he’s out of the city Luke will be subjected to an intensive week-long learning module so he’ll retain at least the basic information taught in New Sydney schools; they’ve put his age at roughly nineteen so it won’t be that unbelievable that he would have lost some of the knowledge crammed into them in their early formative years due to disuse and continued exposure to adverts clamoring for precious brain-space. It’s Ashton’s job to make sure everything goes smoothly between now and then, assisted by Michael. In bed Michael hums a piece of one of the old songs, tapping his fingers along Ashton’s bare shoulders in time to the beat. They got home just before the curfew started; it was cutting it a little close, but there are concessions in place for people coming from the mag-train platforms after the last train of the evening. Still, he’s glad to be safely home before it starts because the handlers make both of them uneasy, Michael more so than Ashton.

 

There’s one final payment to be made before Luke leaves. The data chip appears on Ashton’s desk in the late morning. He never sees who leaves them behind for him; that would be breaking some kind of unspoken code of the group. It’s probably dangerous for him to know who it is, as well, so it covers both of their asses in case anyone ever catches on to the whole scheme. In a practiced motion he loads the chip into the holoscreen port and runs the program in the background as he does his work for the day. This time it doesn’t require any input from him other than mounting the drive, and this batch of data chimes helpfully once it’s finished uploading. He does that on the last day of work for the week, knowing that this means there will be a period of time where he and Michael will be without Luke.

He gets one final message in his e-net shortly after he’s gotten home from work. It says simply, ‘It’s time,’ and they all know that once the message has come it’s only a matter of hours before Saporta and Beckett arrive to escort Luke outside the city limits. The last dinner they all have together is bittersweet - Ashton orders pizza and beers and they all sit on the floor around the coffee table not speaking - and it’s weird. “I can’t believe this is the last time we’ll all be together like this,” Michael says. Ashton rubs his knuckles against the inside of Michael’s wrist affectionately.

“I’m only going to be gone a week,” Luke points out. He’s been chipper through the entire process so far. In fact he’s the only one not saddened about his departure; his bag is sitting by the door, already packed. And then he shoves another slice of pizza in his mouth, chewing loudly, and it takes everything Ashton has in him not to reach across the table and swat him for chewing with his mouth open again. They let Luke pick the net-drama they’re not watching. It’s simply running to make background noise.

Michael looks up from his slice of pizza that he’s carefully folding in half to go, “Yeah, but you won’t be coming back here and that’s weird.”

Luke scowls. “You’ll still see me all the time,” he says. “I’m not even going that far!” He’s been in contact with his new monitor, who will be taking over from Ashton when Luke re-enters the city as an official citizen, and that’s who he’ll live with when he comes back. It’s strange to think of him living with someone else. Who knows if they’ll be okay with him leaving damp towels on the bathroom floor carelessly or chewing with his mouth open or his pack-rat tendencies that mean he almost never throws something away? He worries about these things when he can’t sleep and Michael’s snoring softly beside him. It’s not the kind of stuff he can bother Rian about and especially not Feldy, who’s only concerned with the practical side of matters. So he keeps it to himself and quietly stresses out over Luke’s departure, even though he’s sure it will all run smoothly and that Luke will be back with them before it even feels like he’s gone.

“It’s going to be weird,” Ashton decides. He pops the top on another beer can and drinks from it. “Like, we can hang out in public and I’ll have to call you ‘comrade’ or whatever.” Luke makes a face at the word; neither of them have ever known anyone that called people that even though it’s the proper form of address. Some of the things that are expected of them are completely horrible, like the approved vocabulary list that almost no one adheres to. It’s not something that’s strictly enforced - policing speech is about as difficult as policing thoughts would be, and the governing body that poorly tries to disguise itself as being not-BLITS does a crap job of both.

“Comrade is such an awful word,” Michael says solemnly.

They all three break into nervous laughter, clutching each other until they’re a heap of limbs on the floor all tangled together. It’s not that anything particular was funny - this is the last time they’ll have together, all of them just like this - so they’re clinging to it. “Oh,” Luke says sometime later from the bottom of the heap. “Your elbow is digging into my spine.” They both move to accommodate him even though he’s being a baby and he sighs happily. “I love you guys,” he says, shifting so he can wrap an arm around both Ashton and Michael.

Until the van arrives, they stay sprawled out on the floor like that flipping through the holos for something to do. The secret knock comes and Luke springs to his feet excitedly, almost falling over himself in his sprint to answer the door. “Slow down,” Ashton warns him, fearing both for Luke’s clumsiness and the structural integrity of his walls. It’s a fairly commonplace thing between Luke and Michael to patch up at least one section of drywall a week. The door swishes open and Saporta and Beckett step inside, already bickering amicably in that way they have. Ashton’s never asked what the story is between them, but it’s obvious that they are together and the whole handlers deal is a shabby cover-up for their affair. He wonders about the Partners they leave at home, whether they’re active or they’ve gone through the same process Luke is about to or if one of them was once the other’s Partner. It’s probably impolite to ask.

“Alright, boy wonder,” Saporta says, whipping out a pair of zipcuffs from one of the pockets of his trousers. “This is just a formality,” he assures Ashton - whose posture had gone rigid at the sight of the cuffs - and he puts them on the loosest notch, leaving Luke’s wrists lots of room for movement. It will only be until they reach the city limits, but the sight of them still makes Ashton’s blood run cold with the memory of them being slapped on Michael’s wrists and leaving angry red welts behind.

Beckett stands back and lets Saporta do the work, only bending to scoop up Luke’s bag and sling it over his shoulder loosely. Luke doesn’t have a lot of belongings, only enough to fill his backpack until the zippers strain to close. He seems detached from the whole process and Ashton wonders whether he was the one who had to watch his Partner go, not knowing when they would see each other next. Or maybe he needs to stop projecting net-drama storylines onto people he knows in real life.

They each get a chance to hug Luke before he goes. Michael first - he wraps himself around his best friend like an octopus, all teary-eyed and blubbering. “I’m going to miss you,” he whispers, and Luke whispers back that they’ll see each other soon and they bend their heads together for a moment before Michael lets go of him. After that Michael stands behind Ashton, hands stuffed into his pockets, and Ashton hugs Luke goodbye without saying anything. It’s not for lack of things to say - he has a lot of things he’d like to say, but none of them seem appropriate and he has to keep reminding himself that it’s not the end of the world. When did he get so melodramatic, he wonders. And then it’s done; they’ve said their goodbye-for-nows and Beckett looks at Saporta and nods and they escort Luke down the stairs, one on either side to make sure he doesn’t stumble and faceplant himself into the pavement.

It’s a sorrowful, joyful moment. Michael and Ashton stand by the window afterward and watch him go, holding each other loosely around the waist. “He’ll be okay, right?” Michael asks afterward.

“Don’t worry,” Ashton assures him. “If they don’t take really good care of him I know exactly who we need to fuck up.” It’s the most he’s ever told Michael about the way this has all proceeded, not including the times Michael had accompanied him to the tavern. Those had mostly been a formality; he hadn’t minded, but it was a long journey to make just to pass along data. He understands the need to keep sensitive data like Luke’s profile in as few hands as possible. One thing Ashton’s gotten really good at is keeping secrets. Michael’s hand slides from his hand to rest in the back pocket of his jeans and he lets himself be distracted by it, confident that Luke is in good hands. Now that they have the house to themselves they can have sex wherever they want and whenever they want. Starting, apparently, with on the couch.

 

A week goes by in the blink of an eye.

Suddenly, it seems like, the weather has grown colder and they’re on the mag-train to the central travel hub to greet Luke. Michael huddles next to Ashton, shivering. “Why couldn’t Luke come back when it was still warm out,” he wants to know, nuzzling his face into Ashton’s neck. Any other time Ashton would scold him for asking a question like that on the train where everyone can hear, but today he lets it slide because they’re both far too excited that Luke’s coming home. He lets himself wonder - not for the first time - what Luke’s new monitor will be like. The mag-train glides into the travel hub and stops at one of the platforms. They wait a minute before embarking on the trek across the platform and up a set of escalators to search for Luke’s flight. It’s busy inside the hub. Ashton had come prepared for this and once they’ve stepped off the train he holds Michael’s hand tightly, leading the way as they weave through the crowds across the mag-train platforms toward the escalators.

“I don’t know how people do this every day,” he tells Michael as they stand on the escalator to the top floor of the travel hub where all the air transports arrive. At the top of the escalators there’s a huge display listing all the upcoming arrivals and they both scan the board eagerly, looking for the flight in from Perth. Not that Luke has actually been to Perth - he’s been at one of the settlements just outside the city walls and someone in the organization has smuggled him in on one of the cargo vehicles that travel between New Sydney and its smaller suburbs ringing the walls for miles. But he’ll come into the city with all the people from the Perth flight, and as far as Ashton has heard his monitor actually lived in Perth for quite a while before requesting a transfer here.

“Look,” Michael says, pointing at another board directing them to the appropriate terminal. “Baggage claim. Maybe they’ll come out here,” and he drags Ashton toward the baggage claim tubes that feed into the central carousel. They hang back from the throng of people clustered around it, all searching for their own bags with no regard for the hundred or so other people doing the same.

Other people from the organization are scattered throughout the travel hub, they know. Ashton had seen a vaguely familiar figure in a trenchcoat and hat by one of the other arrival terminals as they’d walked. They’re each waiting in a different spot, ready to run interference in case anything goes wrong with Luke’s arrival. He clings to Michael’s hand anxiously, standing on his toes to try and see over the heads of the people crowding around waiting for their own loved ones. The voice over the speakers announces that the flight from Perth has arrived.

‘Stand by for passenger arrivals,’ the announcement goes.

Michael squeezes Ashton’s hand excitedly and bounces on the soles of his feet. “I think I see them,” Ashton says, craning his neck. Luke is head and shoulders above most of the crowd, wearing a pair of sunglasses and looking mildly annoyed. He’s with a motherly-looking woman that’s half his height, talking animatedly to her as they weave through the mob of people all rushing to greet their loved ones. They pause so Luke can adjust the strap of his bag on his shoulder, and then he catches sight of Ashton and Michael waiting for him and they dart through the crowd toward each other.

“You’re here,” Michael exclaims, dropping Ashton’s hand to engulf Luke in a tight hug. “You made it!”

Luke grunts something that might be agreement, weighed down under the combined force of his heavy bag and Michael’s hug. “Mikey, leggo,” he groans, stepping out of the embrace to wrap one arm around Ashton’s shoulders quickly. “Check it out,” he says, pulling back the bracelets on his wrist to show off the tiny red mark where his identity chip had been implanted. Ashton has a similar one, faded over the years of his life. He knows the significance of it. He reaches out and swipes his thumb over it, feeling the tiny knot of scar tissue. Once the excitement falls to a dull roar, euphoria mixed in with relief, Luke remembers his manners and straightens up properly.

“Right,” he says. “Introductions. Guys, this is Liz. Liz, my best friends.” And Liz shakes both of their hands - Ashton’s and Michael’s too, which Michael looks properly thrilled by since in general when they go out he gets largely ignored like he’s a part of the scenery - and she says how nice it is to meet both of them, that she’s heard a lot about them.

“Only good things, I hope,” Ashton says, shooting Luke an annoyed look.

Liz laughs, throwing her head back as she does it. Ashton can already tell that he’s going to like her; she’s this small but tough-looking lady with a huge belly laugh. “You’ll have to wait and see,” she says, frowning up at Luke for a moment before she sighs long-sufferingly and licks her thumb and smoothes a piece of his hair down.

Luke twists away from the gesture and goes, “Mum, stop.” Liz rolls her eyes, looking to Ashton as if to say ‘Isn’t my son hilarious,’ and she straightens out his shirt collar next, which prompts him to whine, “Mum! Mother. We’re in public, stop,” although he looks less annoyed by it and more overwhelmed by the large crowds and the newness of it all. It’s strange hearing Luke call someone ‘Mum’ like it’s a normal thing. Liz fusses over him some more while he bats her hands away peevishly. Ashton holds Michael’s hand again and looks on with amusement, remembering his own childhood and the way he used to wish he had a mum like that to fuss over him. Luke doesn’t even know how lucky he is.

As they walk down to the ground floor of the travel hub, Liz asks Ashton and Michael questions about their lives. “So where did you both grow up?” she asks, pausing to smile at a security guard who watches them make their way toward the hovercar lot. “Always smile at security,” she tells them under her breath, still smiling sunnily at the guard until they’ve passed and he can no longer see them. “It makes them less likely to suspect you’re up to no good.” And she winks at Ashton knowingly.

Ashton tells her that he grew up in New Sydney; Michael falters for a moment and mumbles, “I was tank-born,” ducking his head. It’s a sore point for him that they are trying to work on.

Rather than condescension, which is about the best reaction they can expect from most people, Liz’s face softens and she wraps an arm around Michael’s side. “Well then,” she says, “My door is open if you need anything, hon. Anything,” she reiterates, squeezing his forearm before the four of them pack the boot of the hovercar with her and Luke’s bags and climb inside, Liz quickly giving directions to their sector. Luke moans about how his mother is ruining his life, putting on a spectacular show of teenage angst in case the driver is watching them in the backseat. It’s amazing how seamless the transition is; if Ashton didn’t know any better he would really have thought Liz was Luke’s mother. They’re acting very mother-and-son. The whole ride to their new quarters Luke rubs at the implantation site for his identity chip. Ashton can’t imagine how badly it must itch; he was so little when he got his put in that he barely remembers it, only remembers the cherry lollipop that the tech had handed him after.

The rest of the day passes in a haze of unpacking boxes and moving furniture from room to room until Liz is satisfied with it. “I sure am glad to have you strapping young lads here to do the heavy lifting,” Liz says after they have broken down the last of the boxes and fed them into the recycling chute one by one. “My other sons couldn’t make it down to help us move in, so it would have been just the two of us otherwise.”

Something about the way she says ‘sons’ makes Ashton suspect that this transition is not Liz’s first rodeo, but he doesn’t mention his suspicions. Instead he asks about how many siblings Luke has and Liz tells the three of them about her other two children, pulls out her palmtab and shows off photos of Luke’s older brothers proudly. They are all similarly blonde-ish and tall, and Ashton supposes that’s a close enough family resemblance to pass if no one looks too closely.

To celebrate Luke’s first night they go to the greenlawn theater and it feels like a fitting end to the saga. The last film in the original set of ‘Star Wars’ films is playing - not ‘A New Hope’ but the other one, where Anakin Skywalker turns all evil and it’s both an end and a beginning. They sneak Michael into the theater; Feldy had fitted an old identity chip into a bracelet for him to fool all but the most advanced scanners and registered his thumbprint in the local database. It’s not as good as Luke’s - he won’t be able to travel - but for outings such as this, it’s the perfect dupe. Sneaking into the wrong movie theater is a rite of passage as old as time, and that’s what they do tonight, sitting in the back row of seats and talking too loudly over the film and spilling popcorn all over the heads of the people sitting ahead of them. The film itself is a bit crap; Ashton had known this, but the first time they had gone out together was to ‘Star Wars’ and so he had wanted to keep the parallels intact.

It’s dark when they walk out of the theater. When they had arrived it had still been light outside; Michael clings to Ashton’s arm as their eyes adjust. They walk along behind the other clusters of people joking and laughing, and it strikes Ashton suddenly that to an outside observer they’re just a group of regular guys out together on a Saturday night. It’s a nice feeling. It feels like they could do almost anything in this moment, together, and then just like that the moment shatters into pieces.

Someone says, “Luke?” and the three of them freeze.

A new horror dawns on Ashton as they turn to find Calum standing behind them on the mag-train platform, a pained look on his face. Carefully Luke says, “Do I know you?” keeping his face as neutral as possible. They’ve been drinking a bit - it had been two for one beers at the theater concession - so the best he does is a funny eyebrow twitch that in the darkness might have gone unnoticed. He turns back around, hand resting on his hip as he checks his shiny new palmtap impatiently for the next train time. It’s all so perfectly schooled that for a brief, hopeful moment even Ashton thinks that Calum doesn’t see through it.

“Please,” Calum says. “I know it’s you. I don’t - I don’t care where you’ve been or what you did. I forgive you. Just please come home,” he goes, and he sounds completely miserable. It would almost be enough to believe that he’s heartbroken. After watching his life under a microscope the past few months, Ashton doesn’t believe it’s that. He knows better. But something about the tone of Calum’s voice tugs on his heartstrings anyway, even though it’s not up to him.

Luke handles it brilliantly. “I have my own home now,” he tells Calum firmly. “I’m open to talking, but only if you’re not going to be an asshole about it. I can’t stand you ordering me around anymore. Don’t bother if you haven’t changed at all.” And he bumps his palmtab against Calum’s clumsily, passing along his contact information. The train glides into the platform silently and they board it, separated from Calum by a herd of drunk students all yelling and roughhousing the whole way back to Luke and Liz’s place. No one mentions the way that Luke’s voice had broken when he first spoke to Calum. Ashton and Michael sleep on the floor in the living room at Liz’s, and as he’s lying on his back staring at the ceiling when sleep doesn’t come he thinks of how proud he is of Luke.

It’s the first time in a long time he’s considered himself among family, and this is something he’s made for himself. Maybe it’s small and dysfunctional, but it’s his own. He made all of this happen. They might fuck up along the way - he’s not excluding himself from the number of imperfect people he knows - but things have a way of working themselves out in the end. And he’s proud of himself, too. It might not have been a huge act of rebellion. He’s made peace with the things he’s done in protest of a system that is hugely corrupt. Every small action combined adds up to something bigger. It’s not the end of things by any means, but it’s enough for a start.


End file.
